Description:

A twentieth-anniversary celebration edition of Howard Waldrop's erudite, gonzo, wistful, funny, and beautifully written debut collection of short stories. Waldrop has a capacious, encyclopedic knowledge of superheroes, baseball players, Mexican wrestlers, world wars, long-dead film stars, oddball television shows, pulp serials, radio plays, fairy tales, scientific expeditions, extinct species, and knock-knock jokes. What if the dodo wasn't extinct after all? What if sumo wrestlers could defeat their opponents with the power of the mind? What if Izaak Walton and John Bunyan went fishing for Leviathan in the Slough of Despond? Acclaimed cult author Waldrop's stories are sophisticated, magical recombinations of the stuff our pop-culture dreams are made of. Open this book and encounter jazz singers, robotic cartoon ducks, nosferatu, angry gorillas, and, of course, the dodo.