In "Dumbness Is Everything" and "A Guest in the Universe," Brodkey returns to themes he has treated so memorably in the past - the malevolence of cocktail-party conversation, the conformity and stupefying monotony of suburbia - bringing to them a new refinement and compression.

In "Waking" and "Car-Buying," Brodkey takes us back into the home of the Silenowicz family, Wiley, S.L., and Lila, where unstated threats lurk behind kind words, and where a gentle parental touch carries more than a hint of seduction. "What I Do for Money" catalogues the frustrations and hazards that lie in wait for an office worker who is diagnosed with a brain tumor and dangles before him the cruel illusion of escape.

In all of these stories, several of which were completed in the last months of his life, Harold Brodkey proves that there has never been a more acute translator of the language of power, coercion, and, ultimately, love.