This collection of stories started as a simple observation. When traveling outside of Washington, DC, the city I lived in back in 2014, I realized most Americans didn’t think of my adopted home as a real place. It was a gathering point for politicians and media execs, a “swamp” of power and intrigue. Living in the city, however, I found it to be full of people dealing with their own personal hopes and frustrations, some of whom happened to work in politics or the media, but all of whom were no different from the people I met outside the city.

Washington, DC isn’t just the seat of American politics. It’s home to more than 700,000 people. Michael Anthony Adams, Jr.’s newest collection of short stories, Spare Change, takes readers onto the streets of this city to paint vivid pictures of what DC’s citizens experience on a daily basis.

With I Want to Talk to You, the collection opens on a tale of incarceration and insanity in the capital of the United States. As the stories in Spare Change continue to unfold, Adams explores the many divisions that split DC and the rest of the country across our deepest fault lines. This vision eventually culminates in And What Might Those Ideas Be?, an ode to dreams and possibilities.

Spare Change is more than a collection of stories about a single place: Washington, DC. It’s a collection of stories about people, their suffering and their desires—political, personal, and spiritual—everything that makes us human beings.