Dark, profane, and hilarious, yet ultimately humane, these ten stories are the latest and best of Robin McLean's reports from the eternal battlefront that is the United States. Ranging across the continent, from Alaska to Missouri, from the flatlands to the mountains, each tale is a snapshot of the political, racial, and sexual undercurrents roiling contemporary life, and each finds a way into the nerves and blood that pulse beneath the question of how to live a decent life.Here you'll find stolen children living life to the fullest on the run and on the road, soldiers guarding empty frontiers, and rugged individualists brought low by an uncaring nature. You'll find prehistoric beasts rubbing talons with hustlers as well as death machines lurking beneath the bucolic countryside. Here you'll find hatred, friendship, and pitch-black humor all seething in the same stew.Get 'em Young, Treat 'em Tough, Tell 'em Nothing marries the sardonic moral and political...

'I haven't read a book this dark and frank and sublimely written in a while. Maybe since Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men.' Alden JonesFollowing in the footsteps of such chroniclers of American lunacy as Cormac McCarthy; Joy Williams; and Charles Portis; Robin McLean's Pity the Beast is a mind-melting feminist Western that pins a tale of sexual violence and vengeance to a canvas stretching back to prehistory.With detours through time; space; and myth; not to mention into the minds of a pack of philosophical mules Pity the Beast heralds the arrival of a major force in American letters. It is a novel that turns our assumptions about the West; masculinity; good and evil; and the very nature of storytelling onto their heads; with an eye to the cosmic as well as the comic. It urges us to write our stories anew—if we want to avoid becoming beasts ourselves.

The characters in these nine short stories abandon families, plot assassinations, nurse vendettas, tease, taunt, and terrorize. They retaliate for bad marriages, dream of weddings, and wait decades for lovers. How far will we go to escape to a better dream? What consequences must we face for hope and fantasy? Robin McLean's stories are strange, often disturbing and funny, and as full of foolishness and ugliness as they are of the wisdom and beauty all around us.Robin McLean holds an MFA from UMass Amherst. She teaches at Clark University and lives in Bristol, New Hampshire, and Sunderland, Massachusetts.