This collection of short stories focuses on the game of chess as a symbol of an incomprehensible world, a means of communication beyond language, an unreachable ideal, a trap, a disease, a salvation. The stories in this baker's dozen are literary, hallucinatory, and mystifying, resisting easy conclusions or explanations. Lovers of writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, and Jorge Luis Borges may find something of interest in this collection.