Everything Is Broken

Book excerpt: The stories here document the way we live our days now, very often alone and in dire straits. The stories were chosen for their beguiling voices, their vivid sense of places, their compelling and intriguing characters, their tension, and their suspense. These are stories about what keeps us up at night. Important stories. The subjects are as splendid as they are varied: a talented young swimmer longs for a family and for love as he swims against his arch-rival; a young grocery worker/rock guitarist finds himself lured into a fundamentalist church by a — what else? — beautiful woman; two lonely souls drift through the city streets hoping for intimacy and settling for diversion; a group of old friends, retired fire fighters, honor a dead colleague, a suicide, and face the extermination of their own dreams; the quirky wife of a rising political star suffers a breakdown on the eve of the gubernatorial election; an athletically gifted high school student escapes her wealthy adoptive parents in search of the life, the culture, and the family she was taken from.