The people who inhabit Jerry Gabriel's second collection of stories, The Let Go, strain against their historical moments. A poacher's daughter, a disgraced vet, an out-of-work temp, a professor, a middle-school basketball ace: these are the Great Let Go in whose embattled existence we feel the impact of war, financial crises, and the many lesser perils that attend life. With equal measures of tenderness, ruthlessness, and humor, Gabriel illuminates an Ohio landscape-its cities, suburbs, and countryside-fraught with economic disparity, its characters facing their dilemmas with grief, with anger, but always exhibiting a surprising fortitude. In these seven taut stories, Gabriel writes hardship as a site of hope.