This retrospective Michael Bishop collection of fifty short pieces (thirty-four stories, fifteen poems or prose-poems, and one amusing Moon-based play about writing SF, and "The Grape Jelly and Mustard Method and ") spans the author's entire career, from and "Asytages's Dream, and " written while Bishop was a college student, to and "Yahweh's Hour, and " an acerbic but moving work of science-fantasy political satire composed in 2020. The collection's most distinctive attribute, however, lies in the fact that no contribution is longer than 3,000 words and most are shorter, a kind of Palm-of-the-Hand Stories for lovers of short fiction, heartfelt pieces that afford the reader as much meat as they do flash. and "A Few Last Words for the Late Immortals, and " set on Saturn's largest moon, Titan, embodies a requiem for the entire human species. and "Philip K. Dick is dead, a lass and " memorializes in verse science fiction's preeminent bard of the reality breakdown. and " and "Love's Heresy and " and "The Library of Babble and " appear to be channeling the labyrinthine mind of Jorge Luis Borges, albeit with surprising jinks all their own. And the list of narrative explorations grows and grows . . .Humor and horror, music and whimsy, primates and pathology, mice and men, religion and rebellion: these stories and poems cover the waterfront of human experience while acknowledging the singularity of each human life.