| Summary: | The ten stories in Robert Anderson's debut collection are an inventive and daring foray into the world of the absurd. Leading us across a wide range of settings, from rural Texas to 1930s Spain to a Gulf War field hospital, Anderson shifts our view of the world to incorporate a set of characters slightly off-center and intriguing in their eccentricity. As he casts his writer's spyglass over their atypical lives, they begin to seem natural, universal, almost the norm. Anderson tempts us further to believe his sometimes harrowing vision by incorporating some well-known personalities from our time.In the opening story, "Mother Tongue", Anderson merges fact and fiction to penetrate novelist Norman Mailer's psyche. In "Death and the Maid", a Texas family earns $300 per body from the county to bury vagrants and prisoners next to their home. In other stories, Jimi Hendrix makes his posthumous return to Los Angeles and Leonard Bernstein receives a letter from Catherine of Siena. A woman held prisoner beneath an unspecified American metropolis is rescued amid frenzied media attention but refuses to leave her sanctuary. As we are tossed from one bizarre circumstance to the next, Anderson's sophisticated, sometimes playful prose combines the concrete with the surreal to convince us that we know very little about the world we complacently inhabit.
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