The fifteen stories in Make Some Wretched Fool to Pay focus on the fraught relationship between parents and their children in the contemporary Deep South. In stories set largely in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, power imbalances take center stage, whether that’s within the family unit or in the complex world of high school and college football.

Coaches and players, recruits and boosters square off to gain the upper hand in search of fame, success, and meaning. In stories like “A Guest of the Program,” “Five Star,” and “The Bagman,” college football recruits find themselves caught between their own desires and the reality of a system where they’re little more than pawns. Elsewhere in the collection, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons grapple with loss and memory. In stories like “Absence,” “In the Cold River,” and “The Other Dog,” parents and their children struggle to find meaning in the wake of grief. And in the title story, a broken teenager must come to terms with the legacy of violence imbued by his father. In all these stories, what is left behind by those who come before us must be reckoned with so new lives can be carved out.