For young writers of a certain temperament<U+2015>if they haven<U+2019>t had such notions beaten out of them by MFA programs and the Internet<U+2015>the delusion persists that great writing must be sought in what W. B. Yeats once called the “foul rag and bone shop of the heart.” That<U+2019>s where Peter Cunningham has been looking for inspiration for his novel<U+2015>that is, when he isn<U+2019>t teaching at the local women<U+2019>s prison, walking his dog, getting high, and wondering whether it<U+2019>s time to tie the knot with his college girlfriend, a medical student whose night shifts have become a standing rebuke to his own lack of direction. When Peter meets Leslie, a sexual adventurer taking a break from her fiancé, he gets a glimpse of what he wishes and imagines himself to be: a writer of talent and nerve. Her rag-and-bone shop may be as squalid as his own, but at least she knows her way around the shelves. Over the course of a Virginia summer, their charged, increasingly intimate friendship opens the door to difficult questions about love and literary ambition.