<P>This year Rikki Ducornet is being presented with a lifetime achievement award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her beloved work as a novelist and essayist, but perhaps most of all for her work as a writer of short stories. In the tradition of Italo Calvino, Donald Barthelme, and Angela Carter, Ducornet creates modern-day fables filled with characters as complex and surprising as any in American short fiction. This landmark collection of new stories is generously illustrated by T. Motley, whose gritty, fantastical cartooning explores the same post-magical realism that has been the subject of Ducornet's distinguished career.</P><P>"Rikki Ducornet is linguistically explosive . . . one of the most interesting American writers around." —<i>The Nation</i></P><P>"[Ducornet] writes like a stunned time-traveler, testifying in breathless fragments to exotic ages that have gone or never were. . . . It's startling and refreshing to encounter a writer whose work insists so relentlessly upon the magic of making tales." —Robert Chatain, <i>Chicago Tribune</i></P><P>"In the bizarre world of Rikki Ducornet's fiction, laughter and terror hold hands in an uneasy truce and almost anything can happen." —Richard Burgin, <i>Washington Post</i></P><P>"It is high time that the U.S. discovered one of its foremost women novelists and accorded her the recognition that the ebullient quality of her imagination deserves." —<i>American Book Review</i></P>