Lon Otto's new collection of short fiction, A Man in Trouble, is a very urban book, centered on an inner city neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota. Its stories leave that city at times-for outstate cabins and trout streams, for the South Dakota Badlands, for a tenement rooftop in Havana, Cuba-but A Man in Trouble is rooted in city soil, rocky with the history of diverse people living close together. The stories wrestle with the complexities of family, race, community, social and personal history, and the natural world that is a part of the city, yet also stands outside of it, waiting for us with a terrible patience.