A Worrisome State of Bliss and other Manhattan Metamorphoses

Collection of short stories

Christoph Keller

In the harrowing— and very funny— opener, “The Dane Colony”, a man finds himself the host for an ever-growing population of ants— and makes a surprising decision. In the title story, a provocative meditation on longing, writing and manipulattion, a powerhouse of a New York editor can’t help editing the lives of her husband and lover. And in the collection’s daring centerpiece, “Incident at the Minettas”, Thomas Frank, a war photographer put out of work by peace, comes to New York City to wake up to the sight of his mother being murdered. What ensues is a surreal-all-too-real search through the institutionalized absurdity of post 9/11 New York. Unsettling, insightful, and hilarious, Kafkaesque in thought and Nabokovian in style, these thoroughly contemporary stories explore from very different angles what it means to live in the new era, the War-at-Home era.