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.

"[Katz] reprises the pleasure of everything he has ever written, and yet it is utterly singular. No one who cares about America's literary and art scene in the sixties should fail to read it." — R. M. Berry, author of FrankEmploying the "fine structure constant" that has tantalized physicists for decades, celebrated novelist Steve Katz conjures his life story from 137 discreet, shuffled memories of art, travels, reflections, and confusions. Here are sculpture and teepees, Western mountains, Eastern pilgrimages and, throughout, artists' lives: Kathy Acker, Philip Glass, Vladimir Nabokov, Richard Serra, and a catalog of others Katz knows and knew.