One morning in Los Angeles, a noted homeless drunk wanders into a local market bragging that he killed a man the night before. When the store regulars dismiss him, he leaves and returns five minutes later with the severed head of the victim. The store owner places it in the meat counter and waits for the police. (This actually happened, in 1993.) During the hours that lapse, the head becomes something of magic. The store regulars recount their youth with fantastic stories. The young people in the neighborhood find their lives transformed for the better. And in the end, the local butcher, the...

B. D. Love writes eloquently of troubled lives and troubled loves, capturing as well as anyone writing today the ways in which we both crave and fear intimacy. Two practical-joking school friends betray each other; a man battles his pitifully irascible neighbors; a professor grows infatuated with an immigrant B-girl; a grieving widow becomes obsessed with helping a homeless man; two Vietnamese students learning English struggle with Swift's "A Modest Proposal"-Love's stories illuminate those critical moments when, suddenly, we can save another's sanity and dignity, when we most urgently feel...