No Use Pretending

"The characters in these stories have been forced into conditions of life which they find unbearable, and the stories chart their (often tragically misguided) attempts to relieve their suffering through attempts to connect with other people or through the pursuit of addictive attachments (to opiates in one story, to sleep in another). The collection encompasses diverse genres, from ecologically informed realism ... to a Kafka-esque fairy tale, ... from fabulist 'weird fiction' ... to a meditation on what distinguishes human beings from animals in the form of a re-envisioning of an episode from The Odyssey--this time from a decidedly unheroic perspective. ... The collection also shows stylistic range"--