**A new collection of stories set in the West from one of the most
gifted and versatile of contemporary writers (NPR)
**
Percival Everett's long-awaited new collection of stories, his first
since 2004's Damned If I Do, finds him traversing the West with
characteristic restlessness. A deaf Native American girl wanders off
into the desert and is found untouched in a den of rattlesnakes. A young
boy copes with the death of his sister by angling for an unnaturally
large trout in the creek where she drowned. An old woman rides her horse
into a mountain snowstorm and sees a long-dead beloved dog.
For the plainspoken men and women of these stories--fathers and
daughters, sheriffs and veterinarians--small events trigger sudden
shifts in which the ordinary becomes unfamiliar. A harmless comment
about how to ride a horse changes the course of a relationship, a
snakebite gives rise to hallucinations, and the hunt for a missing man
reveals his uncanny resemblance to an actor. Half an Inch of Water
tears through the fabric of the everyday to examine what lies beneath
the surface of these lives. In the hands of master storyteller Everett,
the act of questioning leads to vistas more strange and unsettling than
could ever have been expected.
