This collection—derived from many impulses but unified through one distinctive sensibility—contains passionate subversive acts of language, oblique takes on American life, outbursts of comic genius, long meditations on the cruelty of contemporary customs, and funny, disturbing glimpses of daily life. Reality is rendered pitilessly real, and fantasy bares its teeth.
At once playful and devastatingly serious, the works in this collection employ a variety of forms—genres, anti-genres, fantasies, games—while highlighting the dangers and delights of contemporary life: Hollywood, tsunamis, war, the art world, AIDS, ambition, weapons of mass destruction, family values, perverse sexualities, urban violence, small change and big bucks, are all used to chum the waters of imagination and truth.
Steve Katz comes off the loping forward rush of his latest masterful novel, Antonello’s Lion, with a collection of short pieces: acerbic, innovative, humorous, and above all, perversely engaging.’
— Rudy Wurlitzer
Steve Katz’s comic genius is subversive. Readers beware. You may die laughing.’
—Walter Abish
‘Steve Katz is an American treasure: a delirious imagination in a major stylist. His 2006 novel Antonello’s Lion, is an epic comic lament. Reading these stories you can imagine Flann O’Brien crossed with Nathanael West. No one has chronicled the impact of the women’s movement more vividly and with less bias. No one has performed more loving surgery on the international art scence.’
—Wendy Walker
In my opinion, Steve Katz is the greatest living novelist in English, and the one most likely to keep our hearts and minds in good working order, to keep us truly human in a world where brainless tech-loving Moorlocks hog the sunshine, and
thoughtful, life-loving Eloi have been driven underground.’
—William Bamberger
A novelist, poet, and filmmaker, Steve Katz is the author of Saw, Antonello’s Lion, Swanny’s Ways, Moving Parts, and Creamy & Delicious, among other books. He has taught creative writing and literature at Cornell University, Brooklyn College, Queens College, The University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, The University of Notre Dame, and The University of Colorado in Boulder, from which he retired in 2003. A native of Manhattan, he lives in Denver, Colorado.
