This collection, a non-baker'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, and 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. This is not necessarily gain, triumph, or resurrection but imaginative recreation, 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.
