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River of Names by Dorothy Allison | All the Way in Flagstaff, Arizona by Richard Bausch

• In River of Names, the narrator and her lover Jesse trade stories about their families.

• The narrator's family is filled with murderers and the murdered, rapists and the raped, horrible perpetrators and broken victims.

• Jesse's family is calm and normal, and she is amazed by the stories the narrator tells.

• At the end of the story, the narrator admits to her lover she lies about things.

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• In the story All the Way in Flagstaff, Arizona, the father, who has been struggling with alcoholism, remembers a picnic when his children were young.

• On that picnic, he chased them around and terrified them, but he thought they were having fun.

• Finally his wife leaves him, and he finds himself at a church in Arizona but does not know how he got there.

A Vintage Thunderbird by Ann Beattie | Talk of Heroes by Carol Bly

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