Mansfield Press presents a showcase of short fiction for uneasy times. Particle and Wave illumines the borderland where the urgencies of daily life clash with our best intentions. Ranging from the playful to the elegiac, the stories in Particle and Wave are filled with vivid characters moving through a landscape of compromised trust, united only by the desire to make sense of this particular millennial moment. The five writers collected here provide a powerful sense of where the contemporary short story has most recently come from, and the direction it may next take a place where the ten syllable text message collides with the enormous longing of the human heart.