The Expendables: Stories

200 pp. Author's first book. Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. A dozen stories deal primarily with marriages--whether just beginning, in progress, influx, or ending--including "Substitute," "Cold Places," "Affair Lite," and more. Most of the stories in 'The Expendables' are about marriages: marriages in process, about to be, about not to be anymore, possibly transgressed and decidedly not so. The stories show human destiny determined by humans, whether resisted, invented, obeyed, or forced.