Ben Greenman's raucous new collection of stories and pieces ranges from the traditional to the impossible, from the Italian to the Russian, from the musical to the minimal. Greenman constructs layer upon layer of artifice, filling the spaces between with thousands of smooth, brown pellets of insight and humor. An editor at the New Yorker and a frequent contributor to McSweeney's , Greenman seamlessly assimilates Borges, Bartheleme, Chekhov and Calvino, developing asensibility at once wholly contemporary and tenderly reminiscent.