These nine gorgeous stories from novelist and screenwriter Jon Raymond find pallid Northwesterners testing the moral perimeters of their decent lives. In The Suckling Pig, set around the preparations for a dinner party, the divorced middle-aged host hires two Mexican men for some yard work at his suburban house, then adds them to the guest list to spur on what turns out to be a transformative and class-blurring evening. The wayward protagonist of...

The quiet, skilled cook Otis "Cookie" Figowitz has traveled west into Oregon with a group of aggressive fur trappers. While living in the territory, Cookie finds develops a frienship with the Chinese immigrant King-Lu, who's also come to Oregon to seek his fortune. Soon the two collaborate on a successful business of selling baked goods in their frontier outpost--but Cookie and Lu's business plan is dependent on stealing milk from the first cow imported...

Wendy is down on her luck, but hoping to turn things around with a summer job in Alaska. Instead, she finds herself stranded with no money in a small Oregon town