Tim Wenzell's Velvet Shipwrecks is a collection of short stories characterized by the unexpected detour, the stops along a narrative way that take the reader into a marginal America, where surprises happen and are cast in a dark humor that paradoxically lights our way. Consider "Check Point," where the entire Wolrath family is arrested for drunkenness--including a sixteen-year-old son "was fed sips of wine in the middle of the fair grounds...