Book excerpt: Painting modern America in saturated colors, this collection of short stories explores the passions and compulsions at the core of our national identity: those qualities that propel us forward or hold us back; that make us strangers to ourselves and others even while we pine for connection; the ways we cope with the inescapable enormity of our nation's geography. A marlin swims circles in a luminous backyard pool; a small-town surgeon broods from the Olympus of his hilltop house, watched all the while by his neighbors below; a knife salesman plies blades of mythic sharpness while crisscrossing a crazed North American landscape like a mad Paul Bunyan; a young man in rural Arkansas nestles into a satellite dish; and a grandfather's body lies in state amid Annie Oakley's last buffalo kill, General Patton's Persian rug, and countless other oddments of a legendary America. Phenomenally imaginative, skewed, and hyperbolical, these stories are honed to cut through the blur of our times.