A bewitching collection of short fiction--haunting and hypnotic meditations on art, movies, literature, and life. In "Dream of a Clean Slate," Jackson Pollock the man struggles with the separation he feels from Jackson Pollock the artist; "The Judgement of Psycho," probes the sexual dynamic of Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins in Psycho, and then delves into the relationship between Hector and Paris in the Iliad; and Orson Welles presides over "Crimes at Midnight," a tense evocation of desire and its consequences. A series of myths for modern times, this is an astonishing debut. “Haskell uses language like a surgical instrument....These are stunningly sophisticated stories in which everything is new....[Haskell] makes language seem limitless in its possibilities.” ― Los Angeles Times “A dazzlingly inventive collection of nine uninhibited narratives that uses myths, meditation, and old-fashioned morality to examine age-old conundrums of life and art.” ― Elle “Simultaneously charming, innovative, and moving.” ― Esquire “Haskell and his wild imagination put some fictional oomph into reality....The highly original, Hemingway-esque prose is just as colorful and provocative as Pollock's paintings.” ― Time Out New York “A wonderfully intelligent, audacious, and perverse collection...I savored every mythic, mesmerizing word of it.” ― Jim Crace John Haskell is the author of Out of My Skin , American Purgatorio and of the short-story collection I Am Not Jackson Pollock . A contributor to the radio program The Next Big Thing , he lives in Brooklyn, New York.