Why did the woman in the restaurant scream? Why is the man falsely charged guilty? The empty cafe fills; reason unravels. In the novella "Solitude, " the last of eight tales in this volume, Solomon Rose returns home after 22 years to confront a dilemma soluble only by murder.

Michael Hoffman's characters are, willy-nilly, participants in plots that don't add up. Some emerge stronger; others, shadows of their former selves. The six stories and one novel that make up this collection are set, wholly or primarily, in Japan, land of the artful mask. Meet the man who loses his key and sets in motion a chain of events whose incomprehensibility he will never understand; a small girl who accosts a fugitive murderer (is he really a murderer?) for sex, only to be admonished to go back to school; a murdered boy who is resurrected (is he really?) and wreaks his mad revenge;...

The four stories of Part I vary in setting from Shinobazu Pond to 19th-century Germany, where Dostoevsky toils in despairing, poverty-stricken exile on Crime and Punishment. The "Nectar Fragments" of Part II are linked short stories set in the fictional Montreal suburb of Nectar, where an aging recluse living like a prisoner in the house in which he grew up struggles to recast the story of Abraham and Isaac into modern form. Was Abraham a saint, or a murderer? No one suspected the recluse himself had a son - who one day appears, seemingly out of nowhere...

Brave Tsavo, the first Rhodesian Ridgeback dog, never dies. An African nature god blessed him with multiple lives, and he returns again and again as a boon to the people he loves. Follow Tsavo's heroic journey from the Dark Continent to the 9/11 disaster site to his life as a loyal shapeshifting companion who crosses the genetic line between man and animal.

Colorful African mythology and my lifelong fondness for fantasy literature have inspired Ridgeback Tales. I am also convinced that dog-to-owner mental telepathy actually exists, because my own Ridgeback, Mister Brown, dictated...