A bewitching collection of short fiction--haunting and hypnotic meditations on art, movies, literature, and life. In "Dream of a Clean Slate," Jackson Pollock the man struggles with the separation he feels from Jackson Pollock the artist; "The Judgement of Psycho," probes the sexual dynamic of Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins in Psycho, and then delves into the relationship between Hector and Paris in the Iliad; and Orson Welles presides over "Crimes at Midnight," a tense evocation of desire and its consequences. A series of myths for modern times, this is an astonishing debut.
“Haskell uses language like a surgical instrument....These are stunningly sophisticated stories in which everything is new....[Haskell] makes language seem limitless in its possibilities.” —Los Angeles Times
“A dazzlingly inventive collection of nine uninhibited narratives that uses myths, meditation, and old-fashioned morality to examine age-old conundrums of life and art.” —Elle
“Simultaneously charming, innovative, and moving.” —Esquire
“Haskell and his wild imagination put some fictional oomph into reality....The highly original, Hemingway-esque prose is just as colorful and provocative as Pollock's paintings.” —Time Out New York
“A wonderfully intelligent, audacious, and perverse collection...I savored every mythic, mesmerizing word of it.” —Jim Crace