This collection—derived from many impulses but unified through one distinctive sensibility—contains passionate subversive acts of language, oblique takes on American life, outbursts of comic genius, long meditations on the cruelty of contemporary customs, and funny, disturbing glimpses of daily life. Reality is rendered pitilessly real, and fantasy bares its teeth.

 

At once playful and devastatingly serious, the works in this collection employ a variety of forms—genres, anti-genres, fantasies, games—while highlighting the dangers and delights of contemporary life: Hollywood, tsunamis, war, the art world, AIDS, ambition, weapons of mass destruction, family values, perverse sexualities, urban violence, small change and big bucks, are all used to chum the waters of imagination and truth.

The first work of fiction ever to hide a hippopotamus

Saw is a milestone novel of the seventies. For the first time what has come to be recognized as a common modern neurosis, astronaut angst, gets full play in the fictional universe. For the first time anywhere in the history of fiction, in one of the most passionate encounters ever written, Eileen mates with a Sphere. Solid geometry finally has a face. The Cylinder is a nemesis, and its terrifying accomplishments rill on like a nightmare for this astronaut. This is a work of science fiction, geometric fiction, irrefutable fact, and gourmand fantasies.

Steve Katz, whose Swanny's Way won the American Award in fiction in 1995 was acclaimed for this novel by the New York Times Book Review as a "...witty fantasist who can homogenize pop detritus, campy slang and halluncination to achieve inspired chaos."