Why the Long Face?

Fiction. Fifteen stories, at once playful and serious, simple and layered, familiar and not. Gertrude Stein and Buffy the Vampire Slayer track down the bridal party to save a Las Vegas wedding. An ambivalent geneticist disappears himself in Texas scrub country. A five-year-old in search of her lost mother walks a high-wire between her home and her lesbian neighbor's. These are stories about people yearning for connection with each other, with themselves, with whatever lies beyond.