"If Philip K. Dick is our homegrown Borges (as Ursula K. Le Guin once said), then Waldrop is our very American magic-realist, as imaginative and playful as early Garcia Marquez or, better yet, Italo Calvino. . . . You never know what he'll come up with next, but somehow it's always a Waldrop story."-Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

"Waldrop subtly mutates the past, extrapolating the changes into some of the most insightful, and frequently amusing, stories being written today."-The Houston Post

"The most startling, original, and entertaining short story writer in science fiction today."-George R. R. Martin

"It always feels like Christmas when a new Howard Waldrop collection arrives."-Connie Willis

Howard Waldrop's stories are keys to the secrets of the stories behind the stories . . . or perhaps the stories between the stories everyone else knows. From "The Wolfman of Alcatraz" to a horrifying Hansel and Gretel, from "The Bravest Girl I Ever Knew" to the sixth Marx brother's story of a vaudeville act tracking down the Holy Grail, this new collection is a wunderkammer of strangeness.

Howard Waldrop, born in Mississippi and now living in Austin, Texas, is an American iconoclast. His highly original books include Them Bones and A Dozen Tough Jobs, and the collections Howard Who?, Night of the Cooters, Other Worlds, Better Lives, and Things Will Never Be the Same. He won the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards for his novelette "The Ugly Chickens."