I've always had this thing for cowboys, maybe because I was born in New Jersey," says the narrator in this collection's title story. "But a real cowboy is hard to find these days, even in the West." In Pam Houston's "bright, edgy, and ruefully self - aware" (Boston Globe) collection of stories, we meet smart women who are looking for the love of a good man, and men who are wild and hard to pin down. Our heroines are part daredevil, part philosopher, all acute observers of the nuances of modern romance. "Houston takes women into grand spaces, both emotional and physical and isolates them until there's nothing left to do but sit down and take a hard look at one's soul.