This collection, a nonbaker's dozen of what the author calls post-Frog fictions, work written since his novel Frog - a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Prize - was completed in 1991, is about loss, mainly: culture ("The Rare Muscovite"), allurement ("The Caller"), reliability ("Flying"), continuity ("Man, Woman, Boy"), potency ("Crows"), companions ("Voices, Thoughts"), skull ("Battered Head"), child ("Lost"), parent ("Turning the Corner"), footing ("The Fall"), prize ("The Victor"), collection ("Moon"), as well as the flip side of loss, not necessarily gain, triumph, or resurrection but imaginative re-creation, creative refutation and self-destructive creation: what-could-have-been, what-I-should-have-done, what-never-took-place, which give the stories' stalkers a brief respite and interim release of unagitated loss, remorse, and compatibility. The range in emotion, situation, and technique is extreme: humorous-tragic, raw-lyrical, implausible-believable, bedlam-calm. Long Made Short is storytelling and story writing and also a story deleted from this collection to shorten it and make it an even dozen.
