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.

Praise

"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

About the Author(s)

John Haskell

John Haskell is a former actor, playwright, and performance artist who has worked in New York and Chicago. He studied playwriting at UCLA and is a graduate of the MFA program at Columbia University. He lives in New York City.

photo: Copyright Mark Boyer/Shoot Digital

John Haskell on Twitter

Table of Contents

Dream of a Clean Slate

Elephant Feelings

The Judgment of Psycho

The Faces of Joan of Arc

Capucine

Glenn Gould in Six Parts

Good World

Crimes at Midnight

Narrow Road