Like the surfaces of a jagged crystal, each story in the collection shows us an entirely different, distorted facet of a whole. Playing games with the basic units of both life and fiction--the solid certainties of the self, the world around us, and the words we use to describe these things--Mieko Kanai creates a reality where nothing is certain, where a little boy going out to run errands for his mother might find that he's an adult, and his mother...