In the Wine Press

About the Book The thirteen stories in this collection track strained lives, characters compressed by the crises of our times, from clerical misdeeds to school shootings. Among them: a father and son comet-watching from a porch they built together confront a constellation of familial abuse; a parish priest grooms a fatherless boy; a politico conquers through think tank schemes until he is defeated by his parents’ death; a spokesman for a major bank insists that a young intern died of natural causes; and a bishop’s secretary discovers a deeper obedience when asked to destroy parish records. Never settling for easy exits, these intense fictions portray a world distrustful of its former guides but populated still by souls searching and finding.