A writer terrifies a small town. A Major League baseball player consults the Buddha. A woman disappears in front of the cameras. A cat whistles. The husband of a writer gets a life-altering makeover in his wife's comic strip. In a series of interwoven tales, a man discovers he's the Baron of a vanished country, only to get entangled in an assassination plot with international ramifications, from Oslo to Paris, from Santa Fe to Pakistan. And in what must be a first in world literature, we are treated to a half-time show, complete with live commentary, and a very special guest star -Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Set in the fictional realm of Haven, New Connecticut, during the Great Recession of 2011, the thirty-six stories gathered here ensconces the reader in the middle of a world both recognizable and unsettlingly strange. Written with caustic wit, and a satirical bent, these tales sometimes tickle, sometimes outrage. With a cast of recurring characters, the author explores the improbable, and exposes the real world for what it, perhaps, truly is -a Joke.