"Nine Inches," Tom Perrotta's first true collection, features ten stories--some sharp and funny, some mordant and surprising, and a few intense and disturbing. Whether he's dropping into the lives of two teachers--and their love lost and found--in "Nine Inches," documenting the unraveling of a dad at a Little League game in "The Smile on Happy Chang's Face," or gently marking the points of connection between an old woman and a benched high school football player in "Senior Season," Perrotta writes with a sure sense of his characters and their secret longings.

"Nine Inches" contains an elegant collection of short fiction: stories that are as assured in their depictions of characters young and old, established and unsure, as any written today.