Ask Yourself and Other Stories

Ask Yourself and Other Stories is a short story collection that explores the way American men and women continuously realign and reestablish themselves in relation to their cultural and economic circumstances. As they narrate and question their interactions with family, friends, and their pasts, characters in Ask Yourself confront their fears of aging, their former experiences with love and desire, and their ambitions for the future. When they reassess the trajectory of their lives, many characters only affirm their initial assessment or "gut" instinct as correct, while others discover that to locate themselves alongside their changing circumstances, they must renew their outlook with vigor and vigilance. Primarily set in small towns and cities in Virginia, stories in the collection largely incorporate characters' particular class struggles while addressing characters' capacity to cope with bareness, isolation, desire, forgiveness and death.