Nine Inches: Stories

Perrotta's stories are gems mined from the ball fields, living rooms, and barrooms of suburbia. Optimally, short stories are not mininovels but instead take a certain incident or atmosphere and elaborate, and with Perrotta, one sees how a single moment—a crushing collision on a football field, a hit batter at a kids' baseball game—can totally alter the course of a lifetime. In "Backrub," a teen watches his peers go to prestigious colleges while he becomes a pizza and drugs delivery guy. Why? Because he blew off writing the essays for applying to what he calls his "safety" schools. In "One-Four-Five," a session of unplanned, drunken parking lot sex ushers a doctor out of his practice and marriage and into a hopeful career as a blues musician jamming on "Born Under a Bad Sign." The collection's title? The distance dancers must remain separated at a junior high school prom.