Steven Arnett: 4 books

Set in the 1970’s and 80’s, most of these stories, like “Waiting for Dan,” “A Chance Meeting” and “One Night Alone,” are about people trying to make their way through lives that are difficult and entirely different than the lives they had planned. They show a slice of people’s lives...

It’s fall 1966, and Robert Byron has returned to his home town of Blue Spring in Michigan after serving in Vietnam. Everyone there tries to welcome him home, but he’s unsocial and ends up alienating almost everyone. He pretty much keeps to himself through the winter, until the money he’d saved...

At 3 o’clock in the morning cabin in Wells River, New Hampshire, a man who had called himself John Jones is run over by a car. He had been out walking in the rain miles away from where he lived, and there is no rational way to explain why. A strange drifter, he’d been living in a rundown cabin...

Set in a small southern Michigan city in the early 1990s, Winners and Losers is a rollicking dark comedy starring Tom Slotrak, a young man who wins the jackpot in the Michigan Lottery and the crazy and (sometimes) adventures he has afterwards. He learns the hard way that money can’t buy happiness...