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From Ragtime and Billy Bathgate to Worlds Fair, The March, and Homer Langley, the fiction of E. L. Doctorow comprises a towering achievement in modern American letters. Now Doctorow returns with an enthralling collection of brilliant, startling short fiction about people who, as the author notes in his Preface, are somehow distinct from their surroundingspeople in some sort of contest with the prevailing world. A man at the end of an ordinary workday, extracts himself from his upper-middle-class life and turns to foraging in the same affluent suburb where he once lived with his family. A college graduate takes a dishwashers job on a whim, and becomes entangled in a criminal enterprise after agreeing to marry a beautiful immigrant for money. A husband and wifes tense relationship is exacerbated when a stranger enters their home and claims to have grown up there.