Dying Man Dead Mouse and other Stories

Despite all its tales of death and dying, this delightful and highly original collection of stories by Lazarre Seymour Simckes is teeming with life. The cast of characters includes God, Satan, Noah, Job, psychiatric patients, doctors, rabbis, a sexton, a Torah scribe, professors, a talking moose, and a parrot that sings American hit songs. Some stories are left up in the air, as if waiting for Elijah the Prophet to explain them at the end of days. This amazing book reminds us of the deeper and lasting joys of surrendering to the voice of a storyteller who can keep us on our toes from sentence to sentence with wit, audacity, orphic utterance, refreshing language, jokes and abiding affection and horror for human folly. As the writer Jerome Charyn puts it, "Simckes is a master of the absurd. Every movement he makes, every line, every gesture, is both funny and dangerous."