An eventful train ride. A fatefully timed snowstorm. Late night confessions, half-baked schemes, and bumbling sexual interludes leading nowhere. An endless string of office temp jobs, basement apartments, and crushing heartache. Relive the era at the precipice of a new millennium, when life was supposedly less complicated yet just as crazy. Written between 1985 and 1995, when the author was in his twenties, these stories were once a young man's singleminded obsession-until, abruptly, they weren't. This one-of-a-kind collection offers a unique glimpse into the mind of an aspiring writer as he let everything else in his life slide. Jerome Stern grew up in the Boston suburbs. His personal account of the alienation, missteps, and romantic dead-ends of young adulthood reads as the bittersweet traces of an increasingly unrecognizable world.