AustLit

'Enter a carnivalesque world where reality is phantasmagoric in vision. This is a rich, riotous world of heartbroken sinners and first-time saints.

'The title novella concerns the Rabelaisian exploits of one Efim Barnum Bank Zaslavsky - a Russian-Jewish carnival exhibitionist - and his anachronistic, wandering gypsy caravan in pursuit of a fabled wolf across contemporary Japan. Both peril and fortune beckon this travelling comic-tragedian sideshow riot.

'The other stories in this collection also favour individuals trapped within worlds both real and mythic, those struggling to identify sense amidst chaos, and competing to dispossess themselves of pains both present and forgotten against new carnivalesque terrains. These are the world's tiny, sordid, tormented and beautiful people with their feet of clay: unsung heroes who, upon discovering the illegitimacy of their plights for love and glory, maintain their purpose - if only for the value of the joke.' (Source: Publisher's website)