In this extraordinary collection, Lyn Coffin writes with heart of longing and searching-for place, for connection, for love. Here, among these 17 stories, an artichoke reveals for a young bride the fault lines already dooming her new marriage; a mother makes final amends for telling an unwelcome truth about Christmas by telling a comforting lie about death; a young girl navigates the madness of her mother, the possible evil of her father and questions about her own state of mind; and we are treated to an inspired retelling of the classic Tortoise and the Hare fable. Coffin’s fictions cross boundaries; they are funny, ominous and heartbreakingly true.

Sexy, smartly engaging and quirkily off-beat, these stories are a delight to read and ponder. - Judith Roche, National Book Award-Winning Author of Wisdom of the Body

Like Oates, like Updike, Coffin gives us characters we recognize, in spaces that are familiar-a coffee shop, a bar. She masterfully reveals the small yet extraordinary moments which eventually become irrevocable fate. Fiction worth re-reading: witty, wise, deeply imagined. - Jed Myers, Author of Watching the Perseids

From the Editor These stories defy our expectations about how stories should come to us, how they should act. These stories have the feel of events into which we have tumbled unwittingly-at times, as though, at a restaurant, we were looking for the bathroom and stumbled into a banquet room hosting a family reunion and one person after another mistakes us for family and begins speaking to us, at other times as though we’ve broken into an apartment and are rifling through private correspondence, completely taken in by the intimacy and the urgency in the language of what we’ve found. Simply put, Iron Twine Press wanted to publish these stories because they are not like any stories we’ve read before.