Like the naked preacher in "Zoo Sounds" who urges passersby to "repent in the raw," Margaret Blair Young peels away layers of pretense to reveal her characters' basic intincts. She writes about people who live hard lives, who face unseen demons, and who find themselves bound to people they do not really understand. In such stories as "God on Donahue" and "Dirge for Rosaidalva Aju," she takes readers on pilgrimages to exotic places and through a labyrinth of modern paradoxes.

In particular, Young discovers a basic, common faith in God's forgiveness--religion at its simplest, most bare-bones essence--coupled with the terror of facing the inability to completely change one's life. She also revels in the common, simple pleasures of life and the need to be loved and trusted. She writes with such immediacy that readers may experience deja vu, as if her voice has become one's own.

Margaret Blair Young is an instructor of English at Brigham Young University. She is the author of four books--Elegies and Love Songs, Love Chains: Stories, House Without Walls, and Salvador--and a contributor to two anthologies: Bright Angels and Familiars: Contemporary Mormon Stories, and Turning Hearts. She has been published in such journals as the Nebraska Review, Nexus, Nimrod, The Southern Review, and the Western Humanities Review, and her dramatic piece, Dear Stone, has been performed at BYU. She has been awarded by the Association for Mormon Letters, the Dialogue Foundation, the Utah Festival of the Arts, and the Utah Arts Council, and has won or placed in the D. K. Brown, Elsie Carroll, Anne Doty, Katherine Anne Porter, Mayhew, Pushcart, and Octoberfest national writing competitions.