Diverse in setting and broad in range, these award-winning stories all turn, in some way, on the passing of the rural Southwest Texas way of life and its stamp on those who leave there. Ranging from bare-bones narratives to magical realism and ever lush in regional particulars, the stories all center on a sense of place. Characters weave in and out of storieslooking for new starts—for answers—and seeing the world through dry eyes. They explore exotic Machu Picchu, Lake Titicaca, and a dig site in Peru and make a voyage of discovery down the Amazon River. They lose faith in God and find it again in such unlikely places as a water lot in South Carolina. The displaced protagonists all search for something elusive, something lost, yet in Geyer's hands are yoked by a tension that is somehow always new and always compelling.

Published in 2003 by Texas Tech University Press, Andrew Geyer’s debut story cycle won the silver medal for short fiction in the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Awards and a Spur Award for short fiction from the Western Writers of America. The book was also a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award.

Andrew Geyer's earthy, edgy, colorful stories range from Texas to Peru, reflecting life's frustrations and occasional small triumphs.

—Elmer Kelton

The Contents reads like the track listing of some Marty Robbins album—dusty and elegiac, but with that ten-dollar smile, that flash of white teeth under a hat brim. Even when the stories take you to South Carolina, or South America, still, it's Texas. The real one.

—Stephen Graham Jones

The most important work of fiction to come out of the Southwest since Woman Hollering Creek.

—Michael Hathaway