"A relentless, haunting mix of the brutal honesty of Camus and the tangible tragedy of Conrad - a postmodern existential triumph." Judging Paradise chronicles a single chaotic day in the life of Frank Walker on the fictional Caribbean island of Santa Clara. Using Thanksgiving day as his backdrop, Dyer sends his protagonist on a strange 24-hour odyssey of violence, envy, and betrayal. The heat steadily rises culminating in a deadly conflagration "that seemed to spew forth from a hot fissure in the earth." Dyer's tightly packed novella, rich in descriptive detail, captures the inescapable...

Harry Taft, a middle-aged man in crisis, looks back on his life as he tries to discover how he lost his way. What emerges is the image of a man who, like so many others, comes to understand that he betrayed himself by trading in the chaos and whimsy of youth "for a seat at someone else's table."