Ugly Duckling Presse (UDP) is a Brooklyn-based, internationally acclaimed small press, “a community of artists, artisans, and creative enterprises.” The vitality of the organization is manifested in the antic energy of its 14 collective members and their various editorial and literary ventures.

In July 1997, I discovered a human skull in front of the Canadian Embassy in Beijing. From a distance and in the haziness of an exceptionally humid night, the luminescent orb looked like some awkward artificial lighting fixture. It looked intentionally placed there.

Both law enforcement officials and readers the world over have a fetish for incarceration. There are now roughly 2.3 million people behind bars in this country, five times more than in 1978. With so many imprisoned individuals there is sure to be a proliferation of prison memoirs and a readership hungry to live vicariously in the confines and conditions of an existence they may know cinematically, but generally not by experience.

Most writings about drugs or drug cultures are as puerile as their subject matter—sensationalistic or moralizing, effusive in condemnation but offering no solutions, limited in scope and—dare I say?—substance. Whether a casebook study of addiction, a memoir regaling in past pharmaceutical misbehavior, or grassroots or governmentally-mandated literature, treatments of the topic rarely address the range of problems,

John Wray (Canaan’s Tongue) delivers another fast-paced novel which takes us through the New York City subway system, tracking a schizophrenic sixteen-year-old boy who, like many of the city’s paranoid residents, believes he has been made privy to information about a pending apocalypse.

Quirk has become a mainstay of contemporary fiction and also something of a malady.