Who doesn’t want a better tomorrow?

But who actually finds it? Why, despite our many shortfalls, can’t we stop ourselves from reaching for hope one last time?

This miscellany of short stories tracks that relentless hunger, that irrational urge in the human heart to leap beyond the ever-retreating horizon of possibility. What compels people to keep scrapping and imagining, calculating and betting, on some golden dawn of deliverance despite the actual track records of their ordinary lives?

In Future Perfect, this reckless prospecting for dreams plays out in the fictional lives of familiar characters, often haunted and harried, often compelled by circumstances into crucibles of cautious optimism—the savant cartoonist, the globetrotting businessman, the betrayed high school Romeo, the naïve mayor, retired store greeter, and others, all recognizable, all caught at the crossroads of everyday choices that find them discovering heroic impulses, claiming the sanctuary of concessions, embracing true identities, and sometimes grappling with the very will to struggle for life or surrender to despair.

How wide is the divide between the real and the ideal?