In his 2000 debut, Mountain City, author Gregory Martin surveys his mother’s deeply-rooted family tree, reticulating the fates of aging relatives and a faded frontier town to assay “how a thing can persist against a seemingly irrevocable will for it to die.” Martin’s follow-up, Stories for Boys, springs from a frantic 2007 phone call: the writer’s 66-year-old father has just attempted suicide.
