In these interlinked stories, Ariel Gore excavates the violence that lurks in desire-the moment tenderness erupts into rage, and the contexts in which rage becomes the only art some of us can express. A runaway conjures a lover out of her own hunger in Santa Cruz. A housewife discovers that domestic silence has a breaking point in Portland. A drifter's black-market cigarette side hustle goes sideways in Tuscany. And in Santa Fe, a parolee finds that even paradise has a secret compost heap. Gore writes noir with a forensic precision and a poet's ear, proving that anger-far from art's enemy-just might be its truest source.
