From the dark side of rural and urban life comes Stokes Howell's collection of stories. Italo Calvino wrote on five essential attributes of fiction: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. Stokes Howell's stories embody these essentials. Each story is tough and quick, each observation lightly wrought with an exactitude that churns with freight. A dark, brooding morbidity; a harrowed, sexual tour de force.

Sex is the engine that drives these tales: under the Brooklyn Bridge, in a restaurant bathroom, on the banks of the Mississippi. These stories are jazz riffs on abandonment. The human animals grunt and slink and desire their way toward satisfaction, or mystery, or heaven.