"[Di Filippo] channelsurfs postmodern apocalypse brilliantly." -Jonathan Lethem

You can try to escape from the mundane, or with the help of Paul Di Filippo, you can take a brief, meaningful break from it. In the vein of George Saunders or Michael Chabon, Di Filippo uses the tools of science fiction and the surreal to take a deep, richly felt look at humanity. His brand of funny, quirky, thoughtful, fast-moving, heart-warming, brain-bending stories exist across the entire spectrum of the fantastic from hard science fiction to satire to fantasy and on to horror, delivering a riotously entertaining string of modern fables and stories from tomorrow, now and anytime. After you read Paul Di Filippo, you'll no longer see everyday life quite the same.

Literary allusions abound in this volume as Di Filippo recasts a classic Melville story of slave rebellion at sea-with aliens; "Ailoura" tells the Puss in Boots fairy tale as a space opera romp; "Observable Things," has Cotton Mather encountering with Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane and "A Monument to After-Thought Unveiled" has poet Robert Frost starting his career writing horror fiction for Weird Tales magazine, edited by H.P. Lovecraft. EMPEROR OF GONDWANALAND contains 18 stories including one published only in this collection.