Greetings from Below, a collection of linked short stories, chronicles the life of Nick Danze, a young copy editor who suffers from several "fixations" he believes are associated with some kind of sexual addiction. By day, Nick works for a weekly trade magazine called Footwear Today, while at night he frequents the various striptease bars, massage parlors, and swing clubs of Las Vegas and San Francisco, the two cities in which he lives throughout the book. Most of the stories are set in Las Vegas, where Nick was raised and where his widowed mother still resides, her emotional constitution slowly unraveling as she mourns Nick's recently deceased father and struggles with addictions of her own: to shopping, gambling, and pure cane sugar. The stories set in San Francisco deal mainly with Nick's longtime relationship with his girlfriend, Annie, whom he loves but with whom he isn't in love. Ultimately, through a series of episodes that spans more than twenty-five years, Nick's life is changed forever when he is forced to confront not just his own predicaments, but his mother's as well.

Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in short fiction, selected by David Means, and the University of Nevada's Silver Pen Award.

What would have become of Nick Adams if he'd been born along the ragged edges of a new American city, one with more churches per capita than any other, and twice the suicide rate? Meet Nick Danze, the main character of David Philip Mullins's vital debut collection, Greetings from Below. The opening story finds fourteen-year-old Nick and his pal Kilburg sitting in the Las Vegas desert, drinking whiskey from Kilburg's fake leg. It's the first of many shocks in Nick's sexual education, which begins with a kiss from Kilburg he calls "practice." In later stories, Nick hires a call girl, visits a swingers' club on Christmas Eve, obsesses over obese middle-aged women, and meets the love of his life, Annie, only he's not sure he loves her and he's compulsively unfaithful. Ashamed of his behavior, he stubbornly repeats it. And lurking behind it all is Vegas, with its gilded casinos, neon-tinted suburbs, and dingy, outer-ring strip clubs. In Nick's wounded honesty and queasy self-consciousness, Mullins awakens us to the perverse power of alienation and shame.

"Mullins writes about these journeys, and about sex and the desert, with a wonderful, edgy lucidity. Greetings from Below is a remarkable debut."--Margot Livesey
David Philip Mullins grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada, and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His stories have appeared in The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Cimarron Review, Fiction, Ecotone, and Folio. He has received awards from Yaddo and the Sewanee Writers' Conference and lives in Omaha, Nebraska, with his wife and two children, where he teaches writing and literature at Creighton University.