With an intelligence that scalds every pretense and surface, Lidia Yuknavitch's camera pans across subjects as varied as Keanu Reeves and Siberian prison laborers. She zooms in on drug addiction, crime, sex of all flavors, trauma, torture, rock and roll, and art, all the while revealing untried angles and alien shapes. She traces the inner lives of characters teetering on edges-death, birth, love, understanding-but never flinching at the spectacle of their violent descent. This collection represents a verbal cinematographer at her best as she captivates the reader with a prose style that is mesmerizing and fluid, deep and dangerous.

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of two previous collections of short fictions, Her Other Mouths (House of Bones Press, 1997) and Liberty's Excess (FC2, 2000); and a book of criticism, Allegories of Violence (Routledge, 2000). She is the winner of the 1997 Fiction Writer's Exchange Fellowship from Poets and Writers. Her writing has appeared in numerous literary magazines, and in the anthologies Representing Bisexualities (NYU Press, 1996) and Third Wave Agenda (University of Minnesota Press, 1997). She has been the co-editor of Northwest Edge: Deviant Fictions and the editor of two girls review. She teaches fiction writing and literature in Oregon.