If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head. As formative events go, nothing else comes close. With these words Edgar Mint, half-Apache and mostly orphaned, makes his unshakable claim on our attention. In the course of Brady Udalls high-spirited, inexhaustibly inventive novel, Edgar survives not just this bizarre accident, but a hellish boarding school for Native...

Eleven stories featuring men protagonists. The story, The Ballad of Ball and Chain, is one man's idea of marriage, Midnight Raid is a man's confrontation with his ex-wife and her new husband, and in The Opposite of Loneliness, a man finds the answer to loneliness in service to the less fortunate.