I hate to make the first review a poor one, but Sherman Alexie appears to have been slightly off his game when he selected these. One of the stories, "Lowell's Class," is well worth reading, but the others, while they show promise on the part of the authors, are pretty uninspiring. One wonders whether these writers are tailoring their prose to please strict workshop teacher, or whether workshops simply encourage denatured, Raymond Carver-esque prose. There's a definite bias toward the misery of the young in these selections, and a couple of them are simply poor ("Amreeki" is incomprehensible, and "Judas Kiss" just plain awful.) I hope these writers discover their natural voices--I don't see much of that here.