The Hotel Eden

In the title story a young man waiting in the Hotel Eden discovers―as others have―that Eden is not a permanent domicile. In Zanduce at Second a baseball player turned killer-by-accident undergoes a surprising transformation. We root for escaped felon Ray (“A Note on the Type”) as he carves his name on a culvert wall. We drive the sweltering summer streets of Phoenix as a nineteen-year-old narrator goes through an unsettling sexual awakening (Oxygen). In these and other stories whether his characters are getting sabotaged by nightcaps or encountering nudists on a rafting trip Carlson takes us to new places in a new way.