In thirteen stories written in a style so carefully crafted that they 
appear etched, Naton Leslie’s characters take a deep breath and 
make the impossible choices which circumstance, and the will to 
love and live, make inevitable.

    "Naton Leslie’s passionately detailed prose wrings meaning from 
the lives of Americans passed over by the go-go economics of the 
last thirty years, the working poor of the rust belt and the old 
upstate New York mill towns gone to seed. His characters are 
desperately trying to find love and dignity in the wreckage of a 
society where the old verities—honesty, hard work, fair dealing—
don’t count for much any more. Leslie writes with panache, he has 
a gift for metaphor, every story grabs the reader, every story 
contains a heart-stopping burst of dramatic intensity."—Douglas 
Glover, author, The Life and Times of Captain N. and 16 
Categories of Desire

    "Courage, compassion, humor in abundance, a college kid who 
ruptures Houdini’s appendix, a lab technician who drops Walt 
Whitman’s brain, a disc jockey orchestrating the memories of the 
dancers, a woman outwitting loneliness—the range of this 
collection is dizzying, its authenticity humbling, the stories as 
engaging as they are relentlessly honest. I read them with immense 
gratitude."—Steve Stern, author, A Plague of Dreamers and The 
Wedding Jester 
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A graduate of Youngstown State University and Ohio University 
and currently an associate professor of English at Siena College in 
New York, NATON LESLIE is the author of two books of 
poetry—Moving To Find Work and Their Shadows Are Dark 
Daughters—and his poetry has appeared widely in such journals 
as Alaska Quarterly Review, California Quarterly, Prairie 
Schooner, and The Texas Review. He has published articles, 
reviews, and essays in North American Review and Mid-American 
Review, among others, and his fiction has appeared in such 
journals as Chariton Review and Ohio Review.