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Bradford's new literary collection includes stories and tales, surreal vignettes, epistolary exchanges, and dream reports. His experiments in historical fiction are stunning feats of imaginative transposal focused on a seventh-century ascetic and the modern artists Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, and Marcel Duchamp. Bradford's prose is precise, charged, highly metaphoric, at times breath-stealing in its beauty, and versatile enough to capture the ruminations of a serial killer, the inelegant speech of a ranch hand describing his experience of being struck by lightning, and the telegraphic communications of the poet Paul Valery's character Monsieur Teste. Bradford's essay on artistic creativity doubles as a memoir, and the works themselves are fascinating--imagine material artwork that avoids all means of adhesion. The preface mentions his book's main themes: death and the scenes that surround it; spiritual intent and mystical experience; artistic creativity and the production of artwork; and the trials of inhabiting a physical body. An obvious fifth theme is our dystopian future. In the style he calls visionary prose, Bradford describes just such a dark future.
