ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AS QUANTUM PHYSICS AND THE ART OF DEPARTURE (2011)A basketball coach gets caught between his team, his family, and the expectations of a town with a thirst for winning. A traveling salesman, stranded far from home, explores the dark corners of his life on a late-night bus ride. A prison inmate clings to his dignity and self-righteousness in a place where everything else is stripped away. A teenage runaway finds unexpected shelter. Mismatched lovers flail away from each other.Craig Lancaster’s debut collection of short fiction, originally released in 2011 to enthusiastic reviews, mined his home terrain of Montana and took on the notion of separation—from comfort, from ideas, from people, from security. Now updated with two new short stories and a selection of even shorter fiction, as well as a an introduction from the author, this collection goes deep into farms, cities and suburbs, into love and despair, into what motivates us and what scares us, peeling back the layers of our humanity with every page. "The success of any short-story collection hinges on the author's ability to create characters that immediately connect with readers. Lancaster excels on this point, ironically so because the inability to connect is his underlying theme." Booklist "It's a real delight to inhabit Lancaster's lonely, darkly majestic Montana locations and desperate characters, a look at a slowly eroding 21st-century America that's as strong as many more well-known titles by major presses. It comes strongly recommended." Chicago Center for Literature and Photography "Lancaster continues to weave together hope and hopelessness with his cast of haunting, unpredictable characters." Montana State of the Arts Craig Lancaster is the bestselling author of such novels as  600 Hours of Edward  and  Edward Adrift , and a frequent contributor to magazines and newspapers as a writer and an editor.  600 Hours of Edward , his debut, was a Montana Honor Book and the 2010 High Plains Book Award winner for best first book. His work has also been honored by the Utah Book Awards (the novel  The Summer Son ) and with an Independent Publisher Book Awards gold medal (the short-story collection  The Art of Departure ), among other citations. Lancaster lives in Billings, Montana, with his fiancée, Elisa Lorello, also a bestselling novelist.