''To make a pact with the thing that threatens you is arguably the smartest trick of all.'' From the brilliant, sui generis Anne Serre come three bewitching, thoroughly out-of-the-way tales, in which kernels of trauma, loss, loneliness and obsession are glimpsed through the glittering gauze of fiction. The Fool may have stepped out of a tarot pack - to walk a mountain trail or worm his way into a writer''s mind. The Narrator proposes his mirror image, a storyteller in sheep''s clothing, who has a bone to pick with language. The power of narrative to trump a stark reality is perhaps at its strongest in the last story; in The Wishing Table the orgiastic antics of an incestuous family are recounted by one of three daughters. A dream logic rules each of these unpredictable, sensual, and surreal stories: romps no doubt, yet deeply moral, and entirely unforgettable ones.
