Two boys discover that the title of their stop-motion animated film about Vietnam has been taken by director Stanley Kubrick. A 150-year-old woman on the run from the government is tracked down by the company who extended her life. A military contractor carrying his robot son in a gym bag struggles to find his way out of the Nigerian delta during a bloody civil war. The wife of an up-and-coming politician grieves his infidelity by prowling rooftops with a sniper rifle. Following his celebrated debut collection, Super Flat Times, Matthew Derby delivers a disturbing new set of stories that plunges us into a lonely heartland of misfits, outcasts, and would-be assassins who lurk in the shadows, searching for connection and meaning in all the wrong places.

Matthew Derby is one of the authors of The Silent History, the first major exploratory, interactive novel designed specifically for the iPad and iPhone, now also available in a print edition from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is also author of Super Flat Times: Stories (Back Bay Books). His stories have been anthologized in The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories and The Apocalypse Reader, and his writing has appeared in McSweeney's, Conjunctions, The Believer, The Columbia Journal, Fence, and Guernica.