"These stories will take you places you may never have imagined before, but in every case the wonder of the narratives will allow you to see over the walls of ignorance and indifference to the heart's core."Here you will find the exceptional, a bit of the absurd, and a lot of the unique, but all in all people who are bluntly making their way in a difficult world as stubbornly as anyone you might meet in a truck stop on the highway headed south." -- from the introduction by Dorothy Allison