TOUCHING THE STARFISH: Ashley Stokes's comic masterpiece stars Nathan Flack, a writer exiled in a backwater teaching creative writing to a group of high-maintenance cranks and fantasists. When a very literary ghost by the name of James O'Mailer starts to haunt Flack, he has to ask himself: is he sinking into a nether world of delusion, or is he actually O'Mailer's instrument? TOUCHING THE STARFISH is a metafictional tour-de-force and hilarious throughout. Comparable to LUCKY JIM and TRISTRAM SHANDY.