This powerful debut collection, set in the light-filled deserts of Nevada and Arizona, introduces a darkly inventive new voice. Like an early Richard Ford, Don Waters writes with skill, empathy, and an edgy wit of worlds not often celebrated in contemporary literature. Set in bars, mortuaries, nursing homes, truck stops, and the "poverty motels that encircled downtown's casino corridor, " Waters's ten stories are full of misfit transients like Julian, a crematorium worker who decorates abandoned urns to create a "lush underground island, " and the instant Mormon missionary Eli, a hapless divorce who "always likes people better when they're a little broken."