George Tilson is an eighteen-year-old farm boy from Iowa. Enlisted in the Army during World War II and arriving in Normandy just after D-day, he is nicknamed Heck for his reluctance to swear. From summers of farm labor Heck is already strong. He knows how to accept orders and how to work uncomplainingly. But in combat Heck witnesses a kind of brutality unlike anything he could have imagined. Fear consumes his every thought and Heck soon realizes a terrible thing about himself: He is a coward. Possessed of this dark knowledge, Heck is then faced with an impossible task.From the Trade Paperback edition.

From the electrocution of Topsy the Elephant at Coney Island in 1903 to the rekindling relationship of two high school sweethearts in a stolen SUV, each story in Nick Arvin's remarkable first collection reveals a world where people struggle against their own shortcomings as time and technology move inexorably forward. With great intelligence, warmth and sly humor, Arvin explores how technology shapes the way we interact with one another and how we experience a world governed by it. With awe and sympathy, he exposes our human limitations despite our apparent advancements—marking both how far we've come and how much farther we need to go. Don't miss this new edition, now with three additional stories.

One instant can change an entire lifetime. As a boy, Ellis Barstow heard the sound of the collision that killed Christopher, his older half brother – an accident that would haunt him for years. A decade later, searching for purpose after college, Ellis takes a job as a forensic reconstructionist, investigating and re-creating the details of fatal car accidents – under the guidance of the irascible John Boggs, who married Christopher's girlfriend. Ellis takes naturally to the work, fascinated by the task of trying to find reason, and justice, within the seemingly random chaos of smashed glass and broken lives. But Ellis is harboring secrets of his own – not only his memory of the car crash that killed his brother but also his feelings for Boggs's wife, Heather, which soon lead to a full-blown affair. And when Boggs inexplicably disappears, Ellis sets out to find him… and to try to make sense of the crash site his own life has become. Raising a host of universal questions – Can science ever explain matters of the heart? Can we ever escape the gravitational pull of the past? – Nick Arvin's novel is at once deeply moving and compulsively readable.