"Mysterious, magical. . .nightmarish, beautiful. . .Vollmann is an exquisite magician of a baroque stylistic obscurity that changes the reader slowly but surely. . .these troubled, voluptuous narratives are deeply concerned with the bewildering effects of trauma and loss. . .the book took reading and rereading for me, just as an intensely odd, seductive love song asks to be heard again and again. But Vollmann is a great storyteller, and the weird aurality is a critical part of these tales."--Kate Bernheimer, The New York Times Book Review

"Transporting [and] bizarrely beautiful. . .[these stories] call to mind no living writers, summoning instead Calvino, Marquez, Kafka. . .So mysterious are Vollmann's motivations, so sweeping his interests, so prodigious is his production, so vastly different is the thing he does from the thing that everyone else does that he may actually be a visitor from another dimension come to report comprehensively back to his home planet." - Esquire

"A phantasmagoric book, blending bits of Lovecraft and Dreiser, David Foster Wallace and Scheherazade, Poe and the Brothers Grimm. . .builds to a suite of love stories, intended not to shock the unshockable but to trace the far reaches of this author's obsessions with sex and death." - The New York Times

"Every story leaves someone behind, and so loss in itself, whether violent or beautiful, becomes an unrelenting thematic constant. In another writer's hands this would seem like a gloomy trudge, but Vollmann invigorates the subject with folkloric swashbuckling bluster. . .at best, the stories are odd, transportive, and of the blackest humor."--The Los Angeles Times

"Don't be afraid of the bricklike mass of this collection, or of Vollmann's forbidding reputation. Fear only the spectres and vampires that invest these 32 stories with highbrow goth."--New York Magazine

"There are ghost and horror stories here, parables, tales, and tender, more memoiristic stories, all enriched by Vollmann's travels to the Balkans, Scandinavia, Japan, Trieste, Bohemia, Buenos Aires, Mexico. It's less a story collection than a dozen interrelated mini-novels wrapped around various continents."--The New Republic

"A sprawling, enchanting casket of curiosities. . .these stories range from novella-length to just a single paragraph. In their elegant, elegiac meditations on death and the afterlife, we cross broad terrain, including geishas in ancient Japan, vampires in preindustrial Bohemia, and bombings in modern-day Sarajevo."--Atlantic.com

"Vollmann's fiction has always defied easy categorization. Here, he straddles, twists, and morphs action-adventure, horror, political thriller, fantasy, and literary fiction. What gives the book coherence is his singular style: elaborate and picaresque, with a rich vocabulary. . .Mainstays of horror and the supernatural figure prominently, and it's especially exciting to read these pop-fiction conventions treated with Vollmann's narrative richness."--Publishers Weekly

"Creatively sourced, boldly imagined, and incandescently written supernatural stories. . .Throughout this ingeniously fabulist, erotic, musing, and satirical treasury, Vollmann gives monstrous and alluring form to the forces that haunt us, from desire and love to regret and loss, as he contemplates with ardor, sorrow, bemusement, and wonder the beauty and terror of life and death and the vast mystery of the hereafter."--ALA Booklist