This baker’s dozen presents the game of chess, its stage and actors, as symbols of an incomprehensible world, a means of communication beyond language, an unreachable ideal, a trap, a disease, a salvation. These stories are literary, hallucinatory, and mystifying, resisting easy conclusions or explanations.

Contents

Foreword
Notes on writing short...

Short stories on the theme of dystopia and a world where elected leaders are at war with their own citizens.

Washington DC is the setting of the annual library conference and Ally Derringer is anticipating a magnificent event to cap off her year as president. Many new members have recently joined, although it is unclear why.

The festive atmosphere is interrupted as an unsolved murder threatens to wreck the conference. Strangely, few conventioneers seem...