During the time that Kotzwinkle has been developing his comic vision of the contemporary world in books such as The Fan Man (1974) and The Midnight Examiner (1989) — relatively realistic novels with protagonists who are "good-natured zanies" somewhat adrift in an anarchic environment — he has also been working in another, quite different form. While he has made it clear that he does not consider any of his work a part of the "sword-andsorcery" category, his interest in the fantastic as another aspect of the realistic (in Paul Valery's terms) has led him to explore realms other than the modern world, locating stories, poems, and hybrid genres in time and place considerably removed from the late twentieth century. One of his favorite settings is a version of "Europe" in the not very distant past, as in Fata Morgana (1977), which takes place in Paris in 1861, or Herr Nightingale...