James Michener Fellowship winner Joshua Furst’s widely acclaimed debut collection explores the perils and paradoxes of childhood in ten harrowing, moving, and surprising stories, offering a rare and unsentimental depiction of the lives of American youth.

In The Age of Exploration, two boys experience the world so differently–Billy through science; Jason with fantastical powers of imagination–that they sense their lives will stray irrevocably away from each other. In Red Lobster, which won the Nelson Algren Award, a gaggle of children try to please the father who has rounded them up from their various homes to take them to a fateful dinner. And in the collection’s climactic story, Failure to Thrive, a maternity ward nurse takes compassion too far. Emotionally astute, brilliantly written, these stories mark the arrival of a powerful new voice in American literature.