In this short story collection, the acclaimed author of Our Crowd offers fourteen darkly funny and poignant tales of the human heart.

Stephen Birmingham is renowned for his penetrating examinations of America’s upper classes. Here, he proves himself an equally deft hand at fiction, bringing the same knowing wit and piercing insight to the short stories in this collection.

In “She Ate Grass?,” a boy navigates coming of age while buying whiskey for his mother’s cocktail party. In “Race Day,” a shy woman endures her husband’s ambition to join the board of an exclusive yacht club. In these and other stories, Birmingham peels back the layers of middle-class life in the late twentieth century.