Every life is uncertain. Every choice is a danger.

Set on the dark side of Los Angeles, this is a masterful collection of edge-of-your-seat tales: a prison guard must protect an inmate being tried for heinous crimes. A father and son set out to rescue a young couple trapped during a wildfire after they cross the border. An ex-con trying to make good as a security guard stumbles onto a burglary plot. A young father must submit to blackmail to protect the fragile life he’s built. Sweet Nothing is an intense and gripping journey through real lives with big problems, from one of America’s great short story writers.

Richard Lange is the author of the short story collection Dead Boys and the novel This Wicked World and Angel Baby. His stories have appeared in the Sun, the Iowa Review and Best American Mystery Sstories, and as part of the Atlantic Monthly’s Fiction for Kindle series. He was the 2008 recipient of the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009. He lives in Los Angeles.