My younger brother harvests oysters on the Damariscotta River in Maine and talks about a kid on his boat from “up Machias way,” a town on the coast some two hundred miles north of Portland. A good number of the people there have never made it those two hundred miles south. Some never leave town at all. Jason Brown’s second collection of short stories takes place in a Maine town like this, but the fictional Vaughn wouldn’t fall into anyone’s lighthouse-and-lobster idea of “Vacationland.” As for “the way life should be,” the folks in Vaughn—angry high-schoolers, lonely widows, jealous siblings, loggers, teachers, and miscellaneous ne’er-do-wells—don’t have much of a choice one way or the other.

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—Nina MacLaughlin