A quintessential Elkin protagonist, Ellerbee is a good husband, a good employer, a good sport who cares greatly about his fellow human beings--until he is killed during a senseless liquor-store hold-up. Suddenly smote by a deity as indifferent as history, Ellerbee is off on a whirlwind tour of a distressingly familiar theme-park Heaven and inner-city Hell--to learn, along with his late coworkers and a marvelously vivid cast of characters, that much of what they've always heard about God's love, God's wrath, and the afterlife is, unfortunately, quite true.

At times in his life, Tom Harris is a dull schoolboy, an apprentice barber, a delinquent husband, an old man with a monkey who drinks at the Green Man Pub, "il professore Harris" at the University of Genoa, and possibly a murderer. But the question of who the elusive Tom Harris really is, and what crimes he has really committed, obsesses the narrator of this novel. Tom Harris can perhaps be described as a sort of philosophical detective story, ingeniously plotted and wittily told with a stylistic virtuosity on par with the most playful works of Raymond Queneau.

The twelve startlingly original stories about erotic situations collected in "The Word Desire" are the best opportunity yet for adventurous readers to discover the fiction of Rikki Ducornet. Always at ease with the sensuous, perverse and eccentric aspects of human nature, Ducornet turns her attention in this collection to the most volatile and easily misunderstood emotion, desire.

Each of these stories centers on a pivotal erotic moment in the lives of the men and women who narrate them, exploring the many strange reverberations that occur when desire is present whether repressed or...