Overview
A scintillating new work of fiction by the author of Spikes, which the Houston Chronicle called "A devilish book, by turns gut-wrenching, philosophical, dazzlingly beautiful, and as hilarious as anything recently published."With the publication of his first novel, Spikes, Michael Griffith burst onto the literary scene, eliciting comparisons to Nabokov, Saul Bellow, and E. L. Doctorow. With this, his scintillating new work of fiction, he again proves that he is "one of the finest young writers in America" (Houston Chronicle).
In the title novella, ""Bibliophilia,"" the unlikely protagonist is a postmenopausal university librarian pressed into reluctant duty as a "sex cop," whose job is to troll the stacks for students intent on illicit coupling among the classics. Her colleague at the circulation desk, an exchange student from Egypt, has come to the States to study hydrology but ends up learning far more about American sexual mores than his subject of choice.
The stories are equally zany and wide-ranging, with settings as diverse as southern Louisiana and Newark, New Jersey, and featuring, among others: a hair scientist who is going bald; an English professor trapped in a monkey cage; a mother who hands her toddler to a mugger while she rummages for money in her purse; a nightwatchman in a used-hubcap yard; and the owner of a landfill who is also the proud father of a teenage chess prodigy. What the fictions have in common is an astute mixture of comedy and pathos. Taking seemingly ludicrous premises, Griffith manages, in surprising ways, to render them poignant.