People are just naturally hopeful, a term my grandfather used to tell me was more than occasionally interchangeable with stupid.

A cop, a cowboy, several fly fishermen, and a reluctant romance novelist inhabit these revealing and often hilarious stories. An old man ends up in a high-speed car chase with the cops after stealing the car that blocks the garbage bin at his apartment building. A stranger gets a job at a sandwich shop and fixes everything in sight: a manual mustard dispenser, a mouthful of crooked teeth, thirty-two parking tickets, and a sexual-identity problem.

Percival Everett is a master storyteller who ingeniously addresses issues of race and prejudice by simultaneously satirizing and celebrating the human condition.