Urban shorts and flash fiction focusing on "black" lives: those of minorities, the marginalised and people outside of mainstream society. The stories (1,200 words or less) are multi-ethnic, multi-genre, multi-style and multi-national. In this collection, you'll meet a pool hustler, a student with a lousy summer job, a man accosted by a local crazy, a teenage girl waiting for her shoplifting friend, an industry-screwed rapper, a homeless man with dreams like everybody else, a drunk gangster with a gun to his head, a young man with a new crush his mother doesn't approve of, a bimbo out to conquer the world . . . and more.

Fall semester. 1997. At a strange Southern college, freshman Tim's eerily prescient Student Handbook tells him he's going to fall in love with 6'6" sophomore Joanie. But Joanie has more important things to deal with than a weird crush - like a creepy English professor, a hallucinogenic drug that's chipping away at her sanity, and a war between rival secret societies that could destroy the University before Tim and Joanie find out if their love is real, or just fiction. Recommended if you like: impossible architecture, books that can tell the future, made-up games with overcomplicated rules, portentous graffiti, secret codes, first love, intense hallucinations, 80s and 90s pop culture, a world that's just a couple degrees off from reality, and a coming-of-age story set in a manufactured community that lets you try on different possible futures - aka college. New chapters of The Boy in the Tunnel post every Friday.