Soft centers

Jess Walter writes tough stories with soft centers. In We Live in Water, his 2013 collection of stories (written before Beautiful Ruins gave him prominence in the literary world), he chooses characters, mostly men, who have lived hard lives and made lots of mistakes. If their lives are a mess, it's mostly their own fault.

Oren Dressens, in the title story, takes his little boy to a showdown with a hood whom he has both stolen from and cuckolded. Years later the son returns to the scene to try to discover what happened to his father.

In Helpless Little Things, a grifter uses innocent-looking homeless young people to beg for money for Greenpeace, which then goes into his own pocket.

Walter explores a nightmarish future in Don't Eat Cat. In The New Frontier, one of the best stories in the collection, two men go to Las Vegas to rescue the stepsister of one of them from a life of prostitution. The smarter one narrates the story, which turns out to be as hilarious as it is poignant.

Another excellent tale, Thief, tells of a father who knows one of his three kids is stealing coins from the family's vacation fund, kept in a big jar. But which one? He sets a trap to try to discover the answer.

Anything Helps is the story of a panhandler with the least likely reason for begging you can imagine.

Some of the 13 stories in the book don't hit the mark, but most of them do.