Author(s): Jess Walter

Fiction

A HarperPerennial Paperback Original

The first collection of short fiction from Jess Walter--a suite of diverse and searching stories about personal struggle and diminished dreams, all of them marked by the wry wit, keen eye, and generosity of spirit that has made him a bookseller and reader favorite



The New Frontier is a darkly comic, heartfelt collection of twelve stories--published over the last five years in Harper's, The Best American Short Stories, McSweeney's, Playboy, and other publications--that veer from comic tales of love to social satire to suspenseful crime fiction, from hip Portland to once-hip Seattle to never-hip Spokane, from a condemned casino in Las Vegas to a bottomless lake in the dark woods of Idaho. This is a world of lost fathers and redemptive conmen, of meth tweakers on desperate odysseys and men committing suicide by fishing.

In "Thief," an aluminum worker turns unlikely detective to solve the mystery of which of his kids is stealing from the family vacation fund. In "We Live in Water," a lawyer returns to a corrupt North Idaho town to find the father who disappeared thirty years earlier. In "Anything Helps," a homeless man has to "go to cardboard" to raise enough money to buy his son the new Harry Potter book. In "Virgo," a local newspaper editor tries to get back at his superstitious ex-girlfriend by screwing with her horoscope.

"In Vegas we stay one step ahead of the wrecking ball--Sahara, Riviera, Imperial Palace, New Frontier--Goin' old strip, we call it," muses the narrator of the collection's title story. "I have this theory, that Las Vegas will be the only American city that future archaeologists will find...and these future archaeologists will recreate our entire culture based solely on this one shallow and cynical little shithole. And maybe they'll be right."