Life Raft

“In these deft, quirky, darkly hilarious stories, the mundane realities of vacations, conferences, and dive bars, of delayed flights and broken furnaces, are intruded on at every turn by the surreal and absurd. Ken Nash’s narrators wander and wonder, befuddled but hopeful observers of secret worlds whose rituals they’re not entirely privy to, worlds in which nothing can be taken for granted. An aspiring milliner goes to visit a five-headed demon, with unexpected results; a rebellious artist whose medium is the weather runs afoul of the authorities; a man may or may not have encountered his own reincarnated self. In exuberant, precise prose suffused with dream logic and brilliant, luminous flashes of wonder, these stories revel in the sinister and delightful, taking the reader to a place not easily forgotten.” — Holly Tavel, author of Weather in Fritz Bemelmans Park