Set in the grungy New York City of the 1970s and '80s, these stories convey a sense of the enchantment that lurks on the flip side of every moment, as if the meaning of life were hidden within the static being blasted out of the loudspeakers on a subway platform, or a scrap of newspaper preserved under ice on a cold winter's day.

A pointless job selling advertising for a community shopper in Brooklyn turns into a journey through a landscape of grotesque puppet-like humans and a head-on collision with evil. A girl trying to save the boy she loves from his disabling infatuation with his uncle, a Holocaust survivor who struck it rich as a merchant on Orchard Street, is defeated by a world to which she could never belong. A dedicated champion of social justice talks herself into believing that the man she finds sexually repulsive is a perfect fit for her perfectly ordered life.

In a voice laced with irony and antic joy, Rosaler glides with deceptive ease from the comic to the tragic to the absurd and back again, introducing us to a vivid and varied cast of characters, many of whom cannot face the truth about themselves and what they are doing with their lives.