Camping with strangers

the long version

"These stories draw their power from the characters' yearning to imagine their lives informed by love, passion, and intimacy. Their yearning gives voice to the unconscious rituals of childhood, the craftiness of the desperate, and the mute sorrows of young women whose futures fold to a neat collapse."--BOOK JACKET. "Each story relates the small incidents between siblings, parents, lovers, neighbors, and pets that characterize the ordinary family. Each draws its motifs - a blade of pampas grass, a spitting locust - from the setting: a middle-class American home that knows nothing of intimacy. The adults fear it, and the children have no experience of it. Without a template for intimacy, the characters turn away from each other and yearn for things that are safer - objects, dreams."--BOOK JACKET.