Fresh Complaint

Ranging from the reproductive antics of Baster to the wry, moving account of a young traveler's search for enlightenment in Air Mail, this collection presents characters in the midst of personal and national crises. We meet a failed poet who, envious of other people's wealth during the real-estate bubble, becomes an embezzler; a clavichordist whose dreams of art collapse under the obligations of marriage and fatherhood; and, in Bronze, a sexually confused college freshman whose encounter with a stranger on a train leads to a revelation about his past and his future.