Highway Speed, the unforgettable debut collection of short stories by Stephen Roger Powers, is a zero-to-sixty road trip through the loneliness of characters who are driving blind and forever mapping a route home. Amateur art thieves randomly pick their targets from city to city. A grieving father obsesses in a dangerous way about the Edmund Fitzgerald. A widow drives an empty bus miles and miles through a blizzard. Powers has an affection in these stories for the lost, the wrecked, the haunted. His darkly comic and memorable characters burn up the road speeding away from the ghosts in their lives only to end up colliding with new ones.