One young father reconciles his parental responsibilities with hatemongers living down the block, another struggles with his own parents' deaths. Fabulist political tales offer resistance, whether in acts of civil or psychic disobedience. Finally, in a novella set on the famously clear California alpine lake, a composite character-ordinary, compromised failure or unlikely hero-responds to the demand that he act on behalf of his own redemption in a gesture of ecological courage or only fantasy.

From a re-imagined Southern California childhood to adult confrontations with power both real and allegorical, these personally and politically engaged stories place their protagonists in everyday circumstances gone surreally rich in possibility, humor and potential resistance. The provocations of everyday political and familial life arrive as fact-fables about fathers and sons, citizenship, faith, addiction, and a nearly mythic insistence on imagination, with opportunities to embrace insight, reconciliation or painful truth.