Though the best American writers live everywhere now, a popular fiction persists: our strongest literary voices are strictly bi-coastal ones. "Barnstorm sets out to disprove that cliche and to undermine another one as well: the sense of regional fiction as something quaint, slightly regressive, and full of local color. The stories in this collection capture our global reality with a ruthless, unaffected voice. Lorrie Moore's "The Jewish Hunter" is a dark romance that's by turns cynical and guileless. Mack Friedman catches the smoking feel of first love in his "Setting the Lawn on Fire," and...