Simon says... virtually nothing. Mute for two years, he is a wanderer, a mystic, a clairvoyant who crosses paths with Brandy, a voluptuous belly dancer, in the Arizona desert. Theirs appears to be a chance encounter, until we get a glimpse at their mutual dreams, wherein a Tarot reading is given to each by an ancient Gypsy Woman. It is she and her apprentice whom the couple eventually meets in a town outside Tucson called Esperanto. Founded by a group of scientists and intellectuals in the 1950s, Esperanto was an attempt to join the world through a universal language. It failed, leaving...

To say that Nana was bred for pleasure is not exactly accurate. A paramour she, indeed, became, but hers was an altruistic genesis (in a prototypical sense), a tool for tissue regeneration, a renewable stem cell resource for graft-quality skin. But, like so many donor drones engineered in the early days of Synthegenetics, some tampering had occurred, creating a non-fatal exception, in Nana's case, which ordinarily never would have come to term. Yet, due to a phenomenon dubbed "spontaneous parturition" whereby material deemed appropriate for a single characteristic abruptly takes on many,...

History is as much comprised of events that did not happen as it is of those that did. It is a fact, for instance, that Flight 405 from Istanbul to New York / New York to San Francisco, took off, landed / took off, landed without a hitch. It is also a fact that Flight 405 might not have touched down safely, due to any number of unforeseen circumstances: engine failure, mid-air collision, quirks of weather, pilot error. To speculate serves no purpose; it is hard to prove the negative. Yet one contingency far less hypothetical might be entertained were it known that Zahra Rahnavard was one of...

Sebastian Lazarus is dead. That should be the end of it. And yet he can reflect upon his past and his remains, alternately exhuming memories of a journey made across Africa and chronicling his corpse's dust-to-dust decay. A travelogue of the soul, a memoir of two hearts entwined, Dance Me on the Table follows Yayuk Kertanegara, an Indonesian Muslim, and Sebastian Lazarus, her American atheist consort, over landscapes bleak to beautiful, commonplace to bizarre - contrasts mirrored by the mismatched pair themselves... ...with a companion short story (epitaph or foreshadowing) entitled "dog...

In prehistoric Africa, a dark-skinned woman gives birth to a fair-skinned child. Because this child resembles neither parent, nor anyone from the tribe, nor anyone from the tribe's collective ancestors, it is reasoned he has come from the distant future. And to this distant future (via death) he is ritualistically sent. Segue to a film being shot, in Cameroon and in Masai Mara, Kenya, entitled "Cargoes of Conscience," starring an actor who was Illinois' first test-tube baby, and who spent his first nine months in a surrogate womb.

LONESOME SOUL SOUGHT Looking for a writer / lover who knows what he wants and can describe his heart's ideal. For the right man, I could be a dream come true. PO BOX 666, BERKELEY, CA 94709-0836

Twenty hand-drawn mazes featuring scenes of San Francisco for children and adults alike.

What could a committed bachelor from San Francisco and a nubile maiden from Jakarta possibly have in common when he moreover is a 'devout' Atheist and she is a 'fickle' Muslim, when he is frugal to a fault and she spends rupiah like royalty, when he is forty-five and she is twenty-eight, when all they've exchanged before Yanti Adiputro meets Nathan Bartholomew Payne at Soekarno-Hatta Airport in late 1993 is a handful of letters intended on Yanti's part to practice English and on Nathan's part to cultivate a contact once adding Indonesia to his round-the-world itinerary? The answer is NOT...