In these provocative, inventive fictions, we encounter a man who dreams of himself as an Arctic wolf, a creature that slowly makes its way into the waking world; a hostile housewife who cultivates out-of-body experiences and imagines how her existence might serve as the basis for a movie starring Jessica Lange; and an autistic child for whom the world and words are the same thing, equally solid and equally malleable. Bradfield's stories are psychologically compelling and hilarious, particularly when he mixes the supernatural with the mundane. Each one of these twenty-one stories demonstrates his singularly rich language and imagination.