Erudite and funny, nostalgic and fanciful, these stories unlock the secret longings and unlooked-for victories that make up everyday life. Whether he finds himself in the stands at Yankee Stadium on Bat Day, or, as in “Aunt Daisy’s Secret Sauce for Hamburgers,” caught off guard by the myriad ways in which a recipe and its misspellings are a window into the woman who wrote it years before, or gently exploring how loss and love get intertwined for a “Bee Girl,” Hayward writes with a sure sense of his characters and the complex, imperfect worlds they inhabit. Talent and passionate complexity have created an elegant and unforgettable collection of stories that are assured in depictions of characters and distinctive in voice.

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Steven Hayward is the author of Buddha Stevens and Other Stories, which won the Upper Canada Writer’s Craft Award in 2001 and was named by the Globe and Mail as one of the top 10 Canadian books of that year; The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke, which won Italy’s Premio Grinzane Cavour Prize for best first novel; and Don’t Be Afraid, which was a Globe and Mail Best Book for 2012 and a Canadian national bestseller. He teaches in the English department at Colorado College. He lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

“The genius of Steven Hayward…is to take the daily slipshod passage of trivial-to-traumatic events, present it as pure storytelling and distill from it the essence of what it means to live, through times both terrible and transcendent… It’s been years since I’ve seen this much fresh talent and wisdom.” —The Globe and Mail