Men attempt to negotiate between their baroque imaginations and the realities of their actual lives in this dark, comic, nuanced, sexed-up collection. Adam Prince's debut bookThe Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Menis a seduction in its own right, a striptease that peels all the way down to the soul.

"The stories feature meth users and junior-high math teachers, old and young, dismal-apartment-poor and McMansion-rich," writes Michael Ray Taylor. "But at their core, each of the protagonists desperately asks the same question as Jim, the narrator's friend in a surprisingly disturbing story called 'No Women Tonight' that is barely 300 words long: "'We're men, aren't we?'"