Fiction. Lara Stapleton takes us to a world in which everyone is intensely human and vulnerable, whether they are roaming the climate-controlled megamalls of Manila or the desolate streets of a Midwest town... With the precision of a microsurgeon, Stapleton dissects the subtle frustrations of the heart, picking out details and tell-tale cracks that make life seem so fragile, and therefore dear (Eric Gamalinda, editor, FLIPPIN': FILIPINOS ON AMERICA). Streetwise, Funky, irreverent--Lara Stapleton's twelve short stories unerringly map that place in the human heart where exaltation and humiliation, hope and fear, merge.