Rick Moody's stories compellingly map the loneliness of private experience and explore the many ways that people give voice to that experience. The Preliminary Notes takes the form of a deposition in which an investigator recounts the unpleasant facts he has learned about himself since he began recording his wife's phone calls; a college student pours out his delusions in a term paper in The Apocalypse of Bob Paisner. The autobiography of a young writer comes housed in the footnotes to a bibliography in Primary Sources The title piece, awarded the Aga Khan Prize for the best fiction through the netherworld of contemporary New York and was the first novella to be published uncut in THE PARIS REVIEW since Philip Roth's Goodbye Angel.
