The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

These angels are useless. The heavenly agents that populate Chris Adrian's new story collection, A Better Angel, sit idly by their hapless wards, disappointed and impotent. Their existence, it seems, is incidental, and at times they are nothing more than a higher order of fuck-ups. Which somehow makes these angels strikingly believable.

Psychology class, at the Saint Paul campus, ended its session. Two students remained. He opened the door for her. She wore a baggy, off-white dress shirt with a narrow, new-wave neck tie. She approached. As if gentlemen's rules, he opened the door wider. She stopped a few paces from the door.

I opened the door to hear, “Stop! Don’t come in! I’m jacking off!” My roommate was leaving to go back to the States in thirty minutes, but apparently he felt the need to do it one last time before he left. And there he was, wearing nothing but a University of South Carolina Gamecocks hat, rolled onto his stomach in pure terror that I had caught him.

“You’ve got five minutes!” I said.

2007 was almost certainly the first year in my adult life that I abandoned more books than I finished. For years I was a masochist about reading, and once I made any sort of investment in a book --bought it, checked it out from the library, cracked the pages-- I felt obligated to finish the damn thing, no matter how unpleasant I found the actual reading experience.

As I was saying, we Crystal Methodists have some unusual customs and rites when it comes to preparing our loved ones for mortal coil off-shuffling.

My mother took me on a wild, unforgettable ride the morning she died. Drugged and nearly comatose for about twenty-four hours, she suddenly started breathing heavily, opened her dull, mucus-covered eyes, and began writhing her shoulders off the bed. I was holding her hand, and she gripped me so hard that her bones stabbed painfully into my palm. This intense, disquieting resistance lasted between five and ten minutes, and then Jeanne Northridge Robson was dead from cancer at age fifty-nine.