The Best of On Impulse highlights an exploration of twenty-first century narrative. In four collections that move from raw to refined, the On Impulse series invites the reader to contemplate how we use language now: online, in full-length books, and with each other. Morgan Kiger arranged this fifth collection to stand on its own while showcasing the series's original trajectory from catharsis to craft. 

Acquainted with Squalor delivers astonishing power of body-and-soul. Meteors fall, an old neighbor tosses an infrared Phoenix beacon into a cup of loose change, and a woman on the phone with a friend mentions nothing about her eviction notice. These nine stories nourish our sense of wonder and acknowledge our deepest despair. Who has the endearing audacity to call a lover "Governor General"? Who will sit down together on a hot day to eat frozen blueberries on a country lawn? Nath Jones captures what it means for us to be at home and still awash in the world.

“My So-called Life” grows up to be no less angst-ridden, but now with legal emancipation from political correctness, and a brutally honest inner voice (which has since grown a potty-mouth), offers a (sometimes) deceivingly flip, pathology into the everyday life of self-indulgent 30-somethings “feeling too much nothing and too much all.” Painfully honest. Unhealthily cathartic. Lift the lid, light a “sleep-deprivation cigarette,” and commiserate. Winner of the 2013 Eric Hoffer E-book Fiction Award

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2000 Deciduous Trees is an exploration of individual experience selected from Nath Jones’s ‘90s zine, The Skirt. Many pieces are vignettes. But "Hollace and Some Girl" is a memorable fiction short story. Overall, as a short story book, the writing resists losing its balance during a time when gasoline was cheap and no one drove slowly on the cusp of the new millennium. The voice yearns for change. But nothing can be done in a twenty-something world where one-night stands get forgotten with execution-style murders.