James Scott LaFon Releases 'Four Handmade Tales From the Heart of America,' a 234-Page Story Collection

Author James Scott LaFon has released Four Handmade Tales From the Heart of America, a 234-page collection of short stories about ordinary people chasing what their hearts want. The book is available through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HK8YG213. Its four stories are set in Pueblo, Colorado; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Las Vegas and New Orleans; and Saint Thomas in the Virgin Islands. The collection is classified as Fiction / Short Stories (single author) and carries the ISBN 9781456687236. LaFon describes the stories as grown-up fiction, with salty talk and adult moments, about what he calls the quiet business of everyday living. It is his second collection of "Heart of America" tales.

Short fiction about working people and small-town and middle-American life has long found its audience among readers of novelists such as Kent Haruf, Elizabeth Strout and Fredrik Backman. The book's description names all three as touchstones for the tone LaFon is after: warm, wry, and attentive to the unglamorous decisions that fill most lives. The characters here are a landlord, a car salesman, a diesel mechanic and a taxi driver. None is a hero in the conventional sense. Each is trying to hold onto something good, whether a marriage, a family tie, a promise to a dead relative or a Sunday morning on the water. The collection is also aimed at book clubs looking for stories that invite discussion.

The first story takes place in Pueblo, Colorado, where landlord Alfonzo Barrett counts the stars from his driveway and wonders whether aliens would pay their rent on time. His wife, Amanda, has a simpler wish: she wants to see their new granddaughter. The tension between a husband's wandering mind and a wife's plain, immediate longing anchors the piece. The second story moves to Albuquerque, where Tesla salesman Felix Sanchez is newly divorced and smoking too much pot. He is counting on a charity golf tournament with his buddies to make life worth living. Both stories treat modest ambitions seriously and let humor come from the characters' own habits of mind.

The third story is the most travel-heavy. When his Uncle Rick is found dead outside the Bellagio in Las Vegas, New Orleans diesel mechanic Aaron Arkansas drives seventeen hundred miles with a key his uncle mailed him. What Rick left in a safety-deposit box tells Aaron what to do, and he carries out every one of his uncle's last wishes, all the way home to a New Orleans funeral parade with plastic aliens riding in the back of his pickup. The fourth story is set on Saint Thomas, where taxi driver Poppy spends his days carrying passengers toward their dreams. What he dreams of most is a Sunday morning of fishing with his grandson and his friends.

Several features distinguish the collection. The four stories share a geography of American places not always at the center of literary fiction: a Colorado steel town, a New Mexico city, the Las Vegas Strip, the Gulf Coast and a Caribbean island that is part of the United States. A recurring motif of aliens, in a landlord's musings and a pickup bed full of plastic figures, gives otherwise realistic stories a running joke. LaFon also frames the book around the condition of the heart itself. In his words, hearts come in all conditions: blooming, bitter, cracked and patched, singing or spewing noise. Each protagonist is prospecting for a heart's desire while trying to keep the good and root out the bad.

The collection is frank about its audience. LaFon says the stories are written for adults, with salty talk and adult moments included, rather than for a general or young-adult readership. That choice shapes the voice: characters speak the way landlords, salesmen and mechanics speak, and the stories do not soften their language or their circumstances. Grief, divorce, distance from family and aging all appear. They are handled with humor and affection, not sentimentality. Readers who want fiction that treats middle-American lives with warmth and without condescension will find the premise familiar, and the settings and characters specific enough to feel new.

"I'm interested in the quiet business of everyday living, and in people who are trying to keep the good they have and root out the bad," said James Scott LaFon, author.

The book has several natural audiences. Readers of contemporary character-driven fiction can use the four stories as a sampler: each is self-contained, and each runs on a different emotional register, from the domestic comedy of Pueblo to the road-trip duty of Aaron Arkansas's drive to Las Vegas. Book clubs can use the four-part structure to divide discussion by story, comparing how each protagonist defines what he or she wants. Readers with ties to Colorado, New Mexico, Louisiana, Nevada or the Virgin Islands may recognize the settings. Anyone who has weighed a family obligation against a personal wish, as Amanda, Aaron and Poppy each do in different ways, may recognize the stakes.

LaFon brings an unusual résumé to the work. He is a retired special education teacher, a former painting contractor and a onetime police dispatcher, and describes himself as a jack of some trades, but not all. Those careers involved sustained attention to other people's circumstances, often at moments of difficulty. That attention is evident in the collection's choice of characters: a landlord, a mechanic and a taxi driver are people who deal with the public and with practical problems daily. LaFon says he enjoys writing, golfing, traveling, following politics, drinking coffee and keeping up with friends in "Heart of America" places and "Heart of America" situations. Golf, notably, plays a role in the Albuquerque story.

Four Handmade Tales From the Heart of America is available through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HK8YG213. The book runs 234 pages and carries the ISBN 9781456687236. Current pricing, available formats and ordering options are listed on the product page. The book is catalogued under the subject heading FIC029000, Fiction / Short Stories (single author), which helps booksellers and librarians shelve it with comparable collections. Readers who prefer to review the description before buying can read the full summary and author biography on the listing. Review copies and interview requests can be directed to the author through the contact details provided with this release.

The new collection follows LaFon's earlier book, Nine Handmade Tales From the Heart, and continues the same project: short fiction set in recognizable American places, populated by people whose ambitions are personal and whose obstacles are mostly ordinary. The shift in title from "the Heart" to "the Heart of America" signals a more explicit focus on place, with the four stories spread across the Mountain West, the Southwest, the Gulf South and the Caribbean. The book's description invites readers already familiar with LaFon's earlier work to continue with it, and offers new readers a self-contained entry point. Each of the four stories can be read on its own, in any order.

About James Scott LaFon: James Scott LaFon is a retired special education teacher, former painting contractor and onetime police dispatcher who writes short fiction about everyday American life. He is the author of Nine Handmade Tales From the Heart and Four Handmade Tales From the Heart of America, a 234-page collection of four stories set in Pueblo, Albuquerque, Las Vegas, New Orleans and Saint Thomas. His interests include golf, travel, politics, coffee and keeping up with friends in "Heart of America" places. Four Handmade Tales From the Heart of America (ISBN 9781456687236) is available at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HK8YG213.