Fiction. Short Stories. Touching wood acknowledges the sway of chance and contingency in our lives without entailing any facile despair. The gesture indeed manifests the guarded hope underpinning even the bleakest passages of these ten variously innovative fictions from Joe Ashby Porter's past decade. Now grave, now twinkling with sly humor, the stories range across the U.S. from Key West to Alaska, and about the Mediterranean in Tunisia, Spain, and Southern France. "Porter manages to accomplish impossible feats: he makes the wild sequence of dreams seem as inevitable as the weather, he turns the ordinary routines of life into riotous adventure, and he stirs words into prose that is giddy and startling and yet always taut, elegant, insistently beautiful"--Joanna Scott. Joe Ashby Porter is also the author of The Kentucky Stories, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, and Lithuania: Short Stories and the novels Eelgrass and Resident Aliens.