Gathered Here Together

Fiction. Gathered here together are 22 of Garrett Socol's finely-crafted stories, by turns darkly humorous and light and zany, and often both at once. The characters populating these stories march slightly out-of-step with the world around them: a dentist, his hygienist, and their illicit flossing, a writer who publishes her own suicide handbook, a woman selling baked goods for electroshock therapy. In this collection, Socol brings his wry insight and sensitivity to bear on the madness of contemporary culture, the silliness of everyday life, and illustrates the many ways people, against all odds, keep themselves afloat.