These 22 stories from Bruce Gatenby, author of "The Kingdom of Absurdities" and "A Chronicle of Wasted Time," explore the lives of people struggling to live and love in places as different and diverse as Dubai, Marrakech, Brooklyn, Paris, Idaho, Rome, Munich and Seattle. In "A Guided Tour of Life" a man quits his job at the World Bank and moves to Paris not to become a writer; "An Unfinished Mystery" follows a Palestinian private detective as he decides whether or not to track down a businessman's missing daughter; in "A Big Cloud," an homage to James Joyce, an expatriate returns home after 8 years of knocking around Europe; "Pindar's Apes" is a darkly funny study of academic neurosis; "Roma/Amor" and "The Brenner Pass" explore the sexual politics of The Eternal City; "Sand" shows us the capitalist hierarchy of life in glittering Dubai; In "Kierkegaard For Beginners" a Brooklyn architect discovers the emptiness of material life; "3 By (Not) Me revisits Virginia Woolf's stream of consciousness in "The Waves" via Samuel Beckett's linguistic vision; "The Debris of Life and Mind" and "Marrakech" trace the destruction of a long distance relationship, and "Making Movies" reveals the folly of artistic pretention in the world of independent film. These stories, ranging from one paragraph to a novella, are funny, sad, satirical, shocking, but always insightful and revelatory about globalized life in the 21st century, ultimately addressing the question: how do you write about happiness?"Overall, Gatenby's voice is winning, his storytelling skills are natural, and his wit is wicked." -John Williams
