Magic Sweat

This collection of short fiction, long fiction and one play - the title taken from an expression used by Mircea Eliade - offers in several stories some glimpses and odd looks into the life-problems of a certain Nash, first seen in an earlier work (Beautiful Illusions). Trips are taken: a young, stricken preacher-criminal in "Seeing the Grey" takes off for a while with a latter-day dope-smoking obese man named Fingerwood, and Aiken in the opening "Ways Home" is subjected to a most unpleasant, yet somehow satisfyingly insane series of fugue-like movements as he festinates about. "Dipsocryptamnesia" documents the binge drinker's crazed flight through the night he got his DUI and subsequent trials. "No Prozac For Hamlet," explores the connections between fathers and sons, madness and pretense, as seen on stage and presented by a media shill. Magic Sweat is a fey, yet troubling array of tilted viewpoints, tangled karma and slow learning in a very tragic yet still magic city.