Gary Santorella's Desert Stories moves from hospital corridors to backyard washes, from a near-future courtroom grappling with the deletion of a downloaded human consciousness to a quiet yard where a coyote learns to speak — and what she says changes everything. Here are the people who fall between the cracks of every tidy narrative: a half-Black, half-Chinese man who fits no one's expectations; a hospital social worker who tends to the dying and the desperate with blunt compassion; an Italian-American retiree who watches the desert through his French doors and mourns what time takes away; immigrants caught between two worlds; a writer who places all his hope in a new fountain pen. They carry loss, dry humor, quiet longing, and a clear-eyed sense of the world's weight. Rooted in the austere beauty of the Sonoran Desert — a landscape that humbles pretension and lays bare what endures — Desert Stories is a portrait of the American experience in all its contradictions: unrooted and searching, ordinary and startling, and unmistakably human.