Ten stories. One question. What do you do when the life you knew becomes the Before? A college student working at a beer drive-through falls in love with the owner s wife and contemplates murder to claim her until he faces his own brush with death. A man who has kept his sexuality a secret from his family must come home to help his brother cope with the loss of his wife. A woman reunites with a man she loved in her youth, and reluctantly saves the life of the teenaged girl next door. A camera store clerk with photographs under his bed meets his new neighbor, who has her own secrets. And a soap opera writer struggles to extricate her love life from the familiar formulas. The men and women we meet in Stories from the Afterlife have only recently stumbled, due to choice or circumstance, into the unfamiliar territory of their new lives. We encounter them in Florida resort towns, 1950 s rural North Carolina, 1980 s rustbelt Ohio and in the suburban sheen of the New South, where they wrestle with secret aspirations, drunken confessions, dreamed predictions, and love lost or regained. We re with them all the way. Published previously in the country s finest literary magazines, including Crazyhorse, One Story, and Verb, these stories build a powerful collection that you won t want to miss. "