The Dandelion Cloud, Dale Boyer's remarkable debut novel, told the story of three friends coming to terms with love and sexuality in the late 1970s in the small, college town of Thornton, Illinois. In Thornton Stories, Boyer continues the themes of that earlier work through a series of inter-connected stories that create a modern day Winesburg, Ohio. Here are students, teachers, and small-town residents, all trying to make sense of loneliness and...