Calendar of Regrets

A wildly inventive and visually rich collage of twelve interconnected narratives, one for each month of the year, all pertaining to notions of travel--through time, space, narrative, and death The poisoning of the painter Hieronymus Bosch; anchorman Dan Rather s mysterious mugging on Park Avenue as he strolls home alone one October evening; a series of postcard meditations on the idea of travel from a young American journalist visiting Burma; a husband-and-wife team of fundamentalist Christian suicide bombers; the myth of Iphigenia from Agamemnon s daughter s point of view these and other stories form a mosaic, connected through a pattern of musical motifs, transposed scenes, and recurring characters. It is a narrative about narrativity itself, the human obsession with telling ourselves and our worlds over and over again in an attempt to stabilize a truth that, as Nabokov once said, should only exist within quotation marks.