Towners and Other Stories

Everett Winter is a young boxer and farmhand who forsakes his rural heritage and carries the weight of a small-town tragedy with him into unfamiliar, urban territory, where he rapidly discovers that “Towners” are less than welcome.

In other stories from this unique debut collection, a pair of notorious hell-raisers slam down boilermakers with an infamous police chief; an amateur filmmaker ponders the importance of titles, often pornographic; an oddball freelancer watches a lost dog drown; a street busker abandons art to sample octopus with the rich; and a prophetic mentor exercises a fatal degree of influence on a young, impressionable poet.