"Although the prevailing winds of thought continually warn and admonish us about the unreliability of narratives and narrators and the need to distrust them, all of the texts collected here are stories, in one form or another. But, very importantly, they are also stories about stories that never give up this very basic and ancient rite of passage, in which any story is, at the very least, also a commentary about itself. What had been a very deep conflict (‘if the poetry comes out in a variety of forms, there is always certain punishment for the betrayal of one form by another,’ as Morgan once wrote) finds resolution in the range and variety of the writing gathered here: stories, fable like pieces, fieldwork, anthropological investigation, literary criticism, scholarly research, reportage, and poetry."

from the afterword by Ammiel Alcalay