Philip Kobylarz is an itinerant teacher of the language arts and writer of fiction, poetry, book reviews, and essays. He has worked as a journalist, a film critic, a veterinarian's assistant, a deliverer of furniture, and an ascetic. He currently teaches at Santa Clara University, Notre Dame de Namur, and Menlo College. His work appears in such publications as Paris Review, Poetry, The Best American Poetry series, Massachusetts Review, and Lalitamba. His first book, Zen-inspired poems concerning life in the south of France, is entitled rues. He lives ever so temporarily in the east bay of San Francisco. You don't know who the alien is, you or the other guy, or girl, or possibly both. Not that that makes you companeros; so we learn in these wry stories, told with the air of a disabused Mediterranean wanderer run aground, occasionally, in the American west. From Kobylarz, both poet and storyteller, let there be more. -David Hamilton author of Deep River: A Memoir of a Missouri Farm, Ossabaw, Hard Choices: An "Iowa Review" Reader These stories are the product of a first-rate talent that doesn't let the reader down, intellectually, artistically, or viscerally: no boring, standard literary tripe here, but a healthy serving of smart, readable, sophisticated stories that remind us of the age we live in, of the everyday grotesquerie we're attempting to beat in any way we can-with art that matters and helps us to get by. Philip Kobylarz is really, really good. Turn on to him and spread the word. -Stephen D. Gutierrez, author of The Mexican in His Backyard And NOW-Nowhere 21st Century America-teeming with rivers and rooms, t.v. icons of glamour and war, mysteries of the visitor, the stay-at-homes, the all-nights, and anything but and including the plain as day. We hear it all with the one voice that impels us to wake-up, to embrace both the ordinary and the uncanny figures who dwell outside and inside of ourselves. These stories of leaving do happily confound the reader's arrival at every turn, and serve to confirm us in our belief we are all living the lives of the innocent and inescapably, that of the experienced. -Jeannine Savard author of Accounted For, My Hand Upon Your Name, Trumpeter, Snow Water Cove