These darkly comic and earnestly intimate stories combine the incisive energy of the essayistic with the willing gaze of the individualistic outsider, bringing a freshness to this collection of short fiction, containing award-winning pieces alongside a brand-new gem, that smacks of real life: surprising, unexpected, and intense. A young man digs a canal through his record collection. An expectant father falls in love with a revolver. A woman learns a tornado has leveled her neighboring town, and she is overjoyed, because she hated that town; and a college professor in the near, twisted future is required to carry a gun into his classroom, where he finds that, with a firearm under his jacket, the students finally pay him the attention he deserves. Told with mordant wit, these nine stories show us what happens when what we need is a friend but instead we get something far, far worse.