Even as the world seems to collapse around them, the characters in these ten stories press on, propelled by their own curious brand of courage. From the troubled priest sent to investigate a supposed miracle, to the middle-aged horror movie actress forced to confront her own failures, to the aging punk rocker staring down the barrel of a crippling illness, they are all united by their quest for clarity in the face of imminent disaster. Through loss and grief, chaos and violence, these characters deal with the hands they’ve been dealt with startling grace.

Jeremy Griffin is the author of the short fiction collections A Last Resort for Desperate People: Stories and a Novella, from SFAU Press; Oceanography, winner of the 2018 Orison Books Fiction Prize; and Scream Queen: Stories, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. His work has appeared in such journals as the Alaska Quarterly Review, the Bellevue Literary Review, the Iowa Review, the Hopkins Review, Oxford American, and Shenandoah, among others. He has received support from the South Carolina Arts Commission and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and he teaches Creative Writing at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa.