What would happen if you invited Lorrie Moore, Mona Simpson, Tom Perrotta, and Steven Wright to a suburban barbecue? Something like this wry and wistful new novel of marriage, lust, and disconnection, from the author of What He's Poised to Do. William and Louisa Day are a suburban husband and wife with no children confronting the question of what their relationship means to them, and if and how it will survive. One day, after weeks of bizarre behavior-disappearing in the middle of parties, hoarding mail-Louisa approaches William with a simple appeal: "I want you to build us a house." Caught off-guard by the request, William is suddenly forced to reckon with his own hopes and desires, his growing discomfort at home and work, and, in the end, the fight-or-flight ultimatum his wife has posed for their future. Complicating these questions are the ghosts of other relationships in William's past, both ancient and recent-from the ex-girlfriend whose child is a kind of surrogate son, to his new neighbor, his partner in a recent indiscretion now uncomfortably returned to the foreground. Ben Greenman is a poet of romantic angst in contemporary American life, hailed for his whimsical yet unbearably poignant portraits of people grasping at connection through the fog of crumbling relationships. The Slippage is an emotionally powerful work, marked by Greenman's trademark blend of yearning and mordant wit

Ben Greenman is a writer of virtuosic range and uncanny emotional insight. As Darin Strauss has noted, "Like Bruno Schulz, George Saunders, Donald Barthelme, and no one else I can think of, Greenman has the power to be whimsical without resorting to whimsy." The stories in this new collection, What He's Poised to Do, showcase his wide range, yet are united by a shared sense of yearning, a concern with connections missed and lost, and a poignant attention to how we try to preserve and maintain those connections through the written word. From a portrait of an unfaithful man contemplating his own free will to the saga of a young Cuban man's quixotic devotion to a woman he may never have met; and from a nineteenth-century weapons inventor's letter to his young daughter to an aging man's wistful memory of a summer love affair in a law office—each of these stories demonstrates Greenman's maturity as a chronicler of romantic angst both contemporary and timeless, and as an explorer of the ways our yearning for connection informs our selves and our souls