“Two years ago,” says Sean, the young narrator of “Illuminati,” one of the half-dozen stories in Jim Gavin’s excellent new collection, “Middle Men,” “all my dumb ideas and tenuous connections came together. I sold a screenplay to a finance company that was working with a production company that was developing a project for a pair of comedians who had appeared in commercials for a popular men’s body wash that wanted to distinguish their brand by underwriting a feature film in which the body wash somehow played a crucial role in the plot.”

Sean got a tidy sum for the script — a sum which, according to his calculations at the time, “would last forever.” But after things fell apart due to a variety of factors beyond his control, Sean laments, “Nothing always happens. The literature of Hollywood is depressingly consistent on this point.”