Four vignettes about America's past half-century. In My Hollywood Memoir, the grandson of a silent-screen star goes to Los Angeles to become a movie star himself. It's 1972, and Kid Crusoe Wyatt parlays his contacts into a gay love affair and a starring role in his grandfather's biopic-but will his fate be any different from Granddad's? Sidestep, set in 1980s Ohio, explores how American elites manage to stay on top come what may, even as crack cocaine threatens Jonah Greene's outsized success. Big Luck's Ricardo is a 2000s Mexican immigrant whose sex-worker past stymies his citizenship application, until-after helping to game the California lottery-he realizes what he has to do. The mood darkens in the mid-2010s with Save the Max Man! as a family deals with a child's health crisis by waging war on its medical insurance provider.

Steven Key Meyers was born on a farm in western Colorado. Since earning degrees in English Lit from CCNY and Columbia University, he has written such novels as Good People, All That Money, A Family Romance, My Mad Russian: Three Tales, That's My Story, The Holy Hugs of Father S., Queer's Progress and The Supersonic Phallus.