A collection of short, short stories and a novella about everyday life and the search for meaning. Influences are Charles Bukowski, John Fante, Knut Hamsun, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Ernest Hemingway.

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Brief stories deal with accidents, modern childhood, jealousy, travel, and the relationship between men and women.

Open any door of a house along a dead-end street on Santa Barbara’s West Side and you’ll find lives full of desire, rage, loss, joy, and chaos. This collection tells their stories including The Opera Singer who practices more than her afternoon scales; the boyhood friends who build A Bridge Between Trees that brings tragedy and triumph; The Japanese Wife who struggles to raise a mentally disabled child at a time when they were shunned and labeled; a black couple who try to find A Better Neighborhood; a stressed-out lawyer riding his own personal Midnight Tornado; The Cabinetmaker trying to reach out to a neglected boy; and four young men Driving Without Lights into their uncertain futures. These 17 tales are written from the points of view of the young and old, the moral and questionable, from white-bread Americans and people of color. These are glimpses into lives both compelling and revealing.

I woke up with Moses Henry’s boot holding open my jaw and my right eye was looking into his gun barrel. I heard the slow words, “Take. It. Back.” I know one thing about Moses Henry; he means business when he means business. I took it back and for the last eight months I have not uttered Annie Mukluk’s name. In strolls Annie Mukluk in all her mukiness glory. Tonight she has gone traditional. Her long black hair is wrapped in intu’dlit braids. Only my mom still does that. She’s got mukluks, real mukluks on and she’s wearing the old-style caribou parka. It must be something her grandma gave her. No one makes that anymore. She’s got the faint black eyeliner showing off those brown eyes and to top off her face she’s put pretend face tattooing on. We all know it’ll wash out tomorrow. — from "Annie Muktuk" When Sedna feels the urge, she reaches out from the Land of the Dead to where Kakoot waits in hospital to depart from the Land of the Living. What ensues is a struggle for life and death and identity. In “Kakoot” and throughout this audacious collection of short stories, Norma Dunning makes the interplay between contemporary realities and experiences and Inuit cosmology seem deceptively easy. The stories are raucous and funny and resonate with raw honesty. Each eye-opening narrative twist in Annie Muktuk and Other Stories challenges readers’ perceptions of who Inuit people are.