Scavengers

In award-winning writer Becky Hagenston's third collection of stories, Scavengers, a woman obsessed with reality shows meets a sorority girl on a very personal scavenger hunt. A man discovers that his father suddenly believes in lake monsters. A woman goes to St. Petersburg, Russia and tries to lose herself in museums and palaces to avoid dealing with her husband's near fatal accident. A grown-up Hansel tries hard to be a good father. A young girl begins to suspect that the seances taking place in her basement aren't as harmless as they seem. Hagenston builds worlds of startling emotional complexity, always aware of her characters' darkly humorous circumstances. From Mississippi to Arizona to Russia, the ordinary (a family deals with a grandmother's illness) to the bizarre (a hand puppet takes over a small town), the characters in these stories find themselves faced with the choice to either make sense of the past or run from it. But what do you take with you when you decide to move on?