This collection of short fiction explores characters navigating the modest yet significant complexities of life in the recent past, present, and near future. With a recurring focus on platonic love, these stories play with conventions of literary realism and speculative fiction.

From a young woman aching to break free of the prison of her birth to a lonely bachelor visited by the ghost of a toddler; to a returning soldier who becomes obsessed by ancient warfare in the Middle East to a choose-your-own-adventure life story that serves as a love letter to Generation X; to a young studio writer racing to adapt Orwell’s 1984 into a big-budget mass-market thriller, these stories are hilarious or shattering in rapid succession. In settings across America, from Montana, New York, Iowa, eastern Kentucky and more, these stories take place poised between two worlds—the world that raised and shaped the characters and this new world they have been flung into, always with an eye to the past.

Jonathan Rovner learned to write at Walnut Hills Elementary. He has taught in Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, Colorado, and Iraq. He lives in Coralville, Iowa, with his special-needs dog and others. This is his first book.