Playing Chess with Bulls (ePub)

This collection comprises ten compelling stories of everyday people struggling to make good decisions in difficult circumstances. Nine award-winning stories have been previously published; "A Friend Next Door" is new.

The collection also includes a nonfiction piece, "Avoiding Failures," which offers a unique perspective on gun culture in small-town Appalachia.

Life is never easy. There's always hardship and sometimes danger, but there's also resilience, hope, friendship, and courage. In the title story, a young woman struggles to understand and protect her younger sister who is seemingly bent on self-destruction in a brutal, dangerous sport.

In "Reading the Cards," a young couple faces nearly insurmountable odds and difficult choices as they try to rebuild their lives after tragedy.

Two flash-fiction stories ("Fathering" and "Fishing") expose the difficulties of connection across barriers of distance, trauma, or miscommunication.

The coming-of-age stories ("A Friend Next Door," "The Bus Driver," and "Lizzy Baby*") reveal three very different journeys toward adulthood.

Landscape parallels character, or becomes a character, in many of these stories: the volcanic landscape of Hawaii, rural life in New England and Appalachia, the narrow confines of an elderly woman's single room.

Voice matters. Truth matters. Secrets can save us or destroy us. "Two Out of Three" draws together two sisters with competing versions of truth and memory. And in "Lizzy Baby*," the longest story, a girl on the edge of young adulthood must find a way to be heard when danger threatens from within her own family.

*Trigger warning: "Lizzy Baby" depicts child sexual abuse.