"My relation to words is a sullied one," writes the narrator of Michael Brodsky's story "Postal Clerk" (in Wedding Feast, & Two Novellas, 1981), and the same might be said of the author. Brodsky has been praised as a gifted literary technician whose writing consistently challenges readers to reimagine the purposes of fiction. He has gained a reputation as an author whose principal concerns are not necessarily related to the advancement of a story line: "I feel enormous resistances to straightforwardly telling a story," he said in a 4 February 2000 personal letter, "--to just telling a story--providing the required story-entertainment drug that everybody craves all the more so as the powers that be at the present moment virulently, regressively, demand a story and nothing but a story." Brodsky has received the Ernest Hemingway Citation from PEN and is increasingly compared to Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, Henry James, and Franz Kafka as...