Widely admired and regularly cited as our best living writer of short stories, Owen Marshall turns the focus on his contemporaries. He has searched the country for the finest selection of stories being written today by a variety of local writers. Their current preoccupations range from a dog with no head, to reproducing reproductions, to amateur drug-dealing, to a little liar talking big; their lively characters experience the clumsy conflicts of adolescence right up to a defiant old age. As our writers travel overseas, so their intriguing stories take us from our own backyards to as far afield as China, Morocco, Berlin and the UK.