What I love most about each of these enigmatic, glistery, beautiful, and intricately inventive stories is their valuable celebration of and commitment to the Difficult Imagination. Comprised of skewed appropriations and manipulations of &qu There is the world and then there is the world. In his "Cover Stories" Matt Vadnais uncovers the paradox of "realistic" fiction. One need not go out and bring 'em back alive when one has the more real and inventive terrain of In his deeply imagined, skilfully crafted first collection, Matt Vadnais demonstrates the vitality of the fiction canon as well as the versatility, the possibility, that fiction can achieve in the 21st century. -- Mary Clearman Blew