Hydroplane is a story collection filled with the urgency of erotic obsession. Its breathless voices, palpable in their desire, are propelled by monomania, rushing from one preoccupation into another: a garage, a painting class, a basketball game, boys. Their words take on kinetic force, an almost headlong momentum, as though, while reading, one were picking up speed, veering out of control. The past returns. Rumination are continuous. A stranger at a bus stop is indistinguishable from the narrator's deceased grandfather; party guests turn ghoulish, festivities merge with nightmares.

Each of Steinberg's stories builds as if telegraphed. Each sentence glissades into the next as though in perpetual motion, as characters, crippled by loss, rummage through their recollections looking for buffers to an indistinct future.

Susan Steinberg is the author of The End of Free Love. She has a BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She teachers at the University of San Francisco.

"Susan Steinberg is the formalist who'll make our forms meaningful again."

—John D'Agata

"Now dark, now dizzyingly hilarious, Hydroplane is a mesmerizing collection from a writer who seems to know all our dirtiest secrets. Desire, guilt, loneliness, perversity, shame, love, defeat, adoration all cycle through these precise and primal tales. Susan Steinberg is one of our most wildly fresh and vital new voices."

—Bradford Morrow