What Salmon Know

From the author of the critically acclaimed If I Don't Six, brilliant stories of men in extremis that remind one of the works of Thom Jones, Rick Bass, and Raymond Carver--tales of tough men coping in a world tougher than they are. Elwood Reid's powerful, bruising stories examine the soulful underside of the American male and the violence that sometimes accompanies disappointed dreams. The subject of these stories are all working men, part of a culture that's no longer relevant in a shinier America. From the title story, in which two drunken Alaskan poachers fight some GIs over a bucket of salmon, to "All That Good Stuff," in which a softball team of alcoholic wrecks tries vainly to attain a tiny measure of redemption, to "Dryfall," in which a college dropout barely hanging on as a housepainter must save his brother from violent self-destruction, Reid gives the reader an American landscape where blue-collar manliness is a value besieged from without and corrupted from within.