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. "The sly, deadpan humor in many of these stories is both charming and artful. Humor strikes me as one of the most elusive qualities in fiction, but to Robert Foreman comedy seems second nature. This is an impressive, highly original and satisfying collection." --Christine Sneed, author of The Virginity of Famous Men "Robert Long Foreman's stories are so smooth. They glide along as if on ice. No tricks, to twirls, no fancy moves. And then you realize that that ice is dangerously thin. Every story of Foreman's is two stories. There's the top story, the narrative itself. But underneath is another story, keeping pace, racing along, hyperventilating...The driest humor, the wildest imagination. Bizarre stuff told by the most matter-of-fact, deadpan narrators. In every story, Robert Long Foreman achieves what even the best bestselling authors fail to do: render the extraordinary ordinary; the ordinary, extraordinary." --Sara Pritchard, author of Crackpots (a novel) , Lately , and Help Wanted: Female (stories)