The ten stories in Lindensmith's debut collection deal with the questions of a lifetime. From adolescence into the homestretch of old age, his characters deal with love and loss, faith and hope, despair and death. They keep on going, and for the most part, keep on growing. The fight against gravity, as the narrator in One Small Step calls that parabolic downcurve of midlife, informs all these tales. Set mostly in America's heartland - in St. Joseph, Missouri, and surrounding small towns - these stories show glints of a solid kind of hope for forward movement toward the kind of wisdom and grace that might be gained from the struggle and surprising hardness of life.