The fourteen stories that make up Jonathan Baumbach's eighth book of fiction deals with parents, children, love, basketball, billiards, reading, marriage, divorce--the essentials of everyday life which, through the author's unique strategy of narrative, come to the reader in unexpected ways. Combining comedy and nightmare, these stories distinguish themselves by the charge of their imaginative life, their concern with language, and the play and replay of their form. "Familiar Games" describes a one-on-one basketball game between a 12-year-old boy and his mother, a match that evokes a childhood memory of sexual mystery; "Passion?" concerns the disrepair of a marriage that has presented itself to friends and the world as ideal; "Children of Divorced Parents" centers on the problematic career of a filmmaker who, after several failed marriages, continues to pursue the illusion of first love; and the title story, "The Life and Times of Major Fiction," investigates the mysterious career of a literary confidence man, an impassioned lover of good books, whose life is itself a pastiche of the plots of major fictions.

Albert the mouse finds the perfect clubhouse for his playroom--a human shoe--but first he must measure it and avoid Groucho the cat.

A staple in the literary scene for over forty years, Jonathan Baumbach's latest novel, Dreams of Molly , is a wonderful addition to his oeuvre. A love story as only Baumbach can write, it is filled with the longings and lingerings, the sex and deprivation, the humor and heartache, and the New York nuances that have driven Baumbach's fiction from the start. Jonathan Baumbach is the author of fourteen books of fiction, including You, or The Invention of Memory ; On The Way To My Father's Funeral: New and Selected Stories ; B, A Novel ; D-Tours ; Separate Hours ; Chez Charlotte and Emily ; The Life and Times of Major Fiction ; Reruns ; Babble ; and A Man to Conjure With . He has also published over ninety stories published in such places as Esquire , Open City , and Boulevard . Baumbach, co-founder of The Fiction Collective in 1973, the first fiction writers cooperative in America (it was reinvented as FC2 in 1988), has seen his work widely praised. His short stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories , The PEN / O.Henry Prize , and The Best of Tri Quarterly . The New York Times Book Review referred to him in 2004 as an underappreciated writer. He employs a masterfully dispassionate, fiercely intelligent narrative voice whose seeming objectivity is always a faltering front for secret passion and despair.