These eleven quintessentially American stories fully demonstrate our unstinting capacity for love and loss. As The Atlantic Monthly's C. Michael Curtis puts it, "Tom Bailey's characters live in a world of deceptive simplicity. They move from job to job and in and out of prison, struggle to . . . understand loving attachment, make crucial misjudgments, defend . . . what they believe are manly virtues, and absorb deep . . . disappointments."