The beautiful linked stories in Joseph Bathanti's award-winning collection The High Heart bring us an ensemble of heartbreakingly vivid characters, headed by the young Fritz Sweeny and his volatile and eccentric parents. The setting is Pittsburgh in the sixties and seventies, when the city still lay in the trough of industrial collapse. Through the painfully honest perplexity of Fritz, we are afforded a clear view of the family, the neighborhood, the city, and the era.