A New York Times Notable Book: Darkly comic fables of modern life from a "major discovery" whose "writing gets in your bloodstream like a fever" ( The Washington Post Book World).A housewife with a ravenous lust for the adolescent boy who mows her lawn swallows him whole. A woman nonchalantly hacks off her leg at a posh private club. A father babyproofs his house so thoroughly he never sees his wife and child. And a businessman passing through an airport r...

A wildly imaginative tragicomedy about a fantastical animal on the prowl and its affection for one troubled family.Wendy Dunleavy is desperately trying to hold her family together. But with her politician husband in prison for corruption and her son, Dylan, the former child actor, running unsupervised through the orderly avenues of northwest Washington, she may not have enough muscle for the task. And that's before the first sighting of the mysterious chagwa, a fam...

From silly chuckles to rueful ironic glee to deep cosmic laughter, this new volume of humorous tales samples the best of recent seasons of the popular public radio series Selected Shorts.