Five stories track boys and men as they navigate among the ghosts and mirages of greater Los Angeles. Rifkin's male protagonists are part fuck-up, part primal force, and full of longing-for fathers, for mothers, for sex, for faith, for just getting it right. A one-time actor staggers toward his demise and clings to a ledge of -possibly lunatic belief; a young boy is haunted by cosmic loneliness in the form of a medical encyclopedia; the heir to an absent father's wealth can't quite bring himself to claim his portion. The ordinary becomes epic in the contested terrain between faith and doubt, love and sex, spirit and flesh, reality and illusion. Alan Rifkin is a writer for Los Angeles Magazine. He lives in Long Beach, CA.