Driving the heart and other stories

The battle against self-destruction, the struggle to transform loss into meaning, and the difficulty of connecting with others - especially those closest to our hearts - are part of what make up these beautifully crafted and, in turns, incisively humorous and deeply wrenching stories. In the title story, a man controls his desperation through devotion to a job delivering organs for transplant and ruminates on his sometimes futile life-and-death existence as he tries to break in a young trainee. In "Dog Lover," a son has a quiet but smoldering battle of wills with his blind Vietnam-vet father over the fate of their dying dog. In "Sadness of the Body," an adolescent boy spends a deliriously hot summer with his alcoholic uncle and the uncle's young girlfriend, observing the sometimes surreal schism between the body and the mind as he feels himself falling into his uncle's life. Jason Brown plumbs the hearts and minds of characters trying to make sense of their lives.