'A man in a bar makes a pass at a woman. It's not a good era for passes, but he's giving it his all; his eyebrows have been laying groundwork for hours. His voice - a nice voice he's been told, a radio voice - lingers on her name. She's on her third drink and she's here, isn't she, with him, and not somewhere else and she's finally removed the purse from her lap, on which it had sat like a small guarddog. They're downtown someplace, some downtown, some place, the skyscrapers blazing like exorbitant lamps, metro trains hurling their human cargo past, lakewind breathing concrete and car exhaust, dusk punching out. He's Bill or Mike or Chuck. She's Rachel, Liz, Michele with one l. She has a beautiful name. He's told her so.'Steve Almond's first collection of short stories explores the lives of young men in their twenties and thirties, their confusions, their obsessions, their emotional complexities. Almond has a remarkably sure touch for such a young writer; My Life in Heavy Metal is as exciting a debut as The Fight Club. The stories' range is remarkable, but they are nevertheless all at some level explorations of modern masculinity.