Virgil Su rez's latest short story collection--his first in more than two decades--is subversive and emotionally piercing. A man whose yard is plagued by armadillos, a pair of boys who torment scorpions with gasoline fires, and a father's best friend wasting away with an illness as a son watches the deterioration with fascination and disgust--these are just a few of the characters in these seventeen stories that reveal a dark, satiric view of the...