Salvatore Scibona’s second novel The Volunteer sings with mutable, potentially explosive detail, with events powered by tiny moments sprinkled across vast landscapes. 

Pam Houston has had some questionable writing teachers. There was the professor who dictated his bizarre rules for the stories that students were not allowed to submit to a fiction workshop: “No trees, no snow, no mountains, no skiing, no eyes, no tears, and no female bodily excretions.”