"What you feel first is the simplicity-of sentences, of tone, of description-but then before you know it, complexity has crept in on every level, and by the end of each of these stories you are left marveling at the layers of life history and humanity Curtis Smith has evoked. Beasts and Men, compressed, poetic, poignant, and compassionate, contains some of the best very short fiction I have read in a very long time." -Robin Black, author of If I loved you, I would tell you this