All the Wrong Places: Stories - Tapa blanda

Winner of the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction Molly Giles's nineteen strange and tightly woven tales merge the mythic and the modern with dark humor and deep humanity. Many of the stories contain contemporary versions of ancient guides: a ghost dog seen by a young drifter in love with a much older guru; a wild goat on a cliff forever standing beside her dead ram glimpsed by a woman whose husband battles cancer; a volcano goddess with a small dog appearing to a woman whose boyfriend is flirting with her teenage daughter. The vacationland settings, Hawaii, Ireland, Baja and California among them, accentuate the characters' sense of displacement.

Molly Giles is the author of three award-winning story collections, Rough Translations, Creek Walk, and Bothered, and a novel, Iron Shoes. Previous awards include the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Small Press Short Fiction Award, the Boston Globe Award, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, two Pushcart Prizes, and an NEA grant.