These carefully crafted fictions about the damaged lives of an exotic assortment of characters are poignant, comic, arch, mischievous, and artful. All here is not as it seems to be?the face these characters show us is not the only face we see. Finely controlled as they are, these stories are expressions of desperation, and though apparently cool and dispassionate, they reverberate with emotional tension.
General Note
Several stories previously published in slightly different versions.