Short stories are hard, and we all know that. This is Greg Jackson's first published collection and it's easy to tell. About half of the stories were very interesting; the other half I found uninteresting because it seemed as if the writer may have just been hiding biographical details about his life within various stories - they seemed too specific-yet-general young man angsty yet clearly personal to Jackson to have been creatively thought up. As I said before, about half of the stories were genuinely interesting, but as with many short stories, the pitfall is that it doesn't go anywhere or rise above an elementary slice-of-life level. ( )