Short stories depicting individuals trying to live with and without their dysfunctional families, clinging to whatever stability they can find.

“Newcomer Panning tracks the dreams and travails of a passel of hard-luck Minnesotans. A chronically depressed, perpetually medicated woman (‘I’m Joan, the sick one, don’t mind when I throw my lamp against the wall’) uneasily coexists with her older sister Lillian and Lillian’s alcoholic boyfriend (‘I hate him and he hates me’). An unsightly facial cyst hampers Rollie, a lab technician, in finding a girlfriend; loyal Harlan, an 18-year-old hired farmhand, is unfairly booted from his job when his wife is nine months pregnant; 12-year-old Ivan’s father ran off with the librarian, leaving him to cope with his unbalanced mother and a styful of unruly pigs; and trailer-park denizen Lizzie has an alcoholic father who ekes out a meager living as a barber, and a farmer uncle who sexually abuses his daughter in Lizzie’s presence.” —Publishers Weekly