Andrew Porter grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the youngest of three children. He received his B.A. in English from Vassar College and an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the author of the short story collection, The Theory of Light and Matter, which won the 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, was published in hardcover in Fall 2008, and was recently republished in paperback by Vintage/Knopf.

These ten stories take us across the country—from rural Pennsylvania to Southern California to suburban Connecticut—and deep into characters struggling to find meaning in their day-to-d...