Roger Nash gained international acclaim for his title story "The Camera and the Cobra," which won the PEN/O.Henry Prize Story Award, and was anthologized by Anchor Books (PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories 2009) as one of the twenty best short stories published in North America. Nash's short stories explore a theme less familiar in literature but common in life: how the course of our own day-to-day lives can be deeply ambiguous, a sheer mystery to us. He explores the tragedy and humour of this, over a rich variety of lives and situations, sometimes realistically leaving the mystery and loose-ends of life teasingly unresolved for both his characters and readers. He shows how the phrase "mystery writing" can be richly and revealingly extended beyond its more usual application to crimes and their solution, to the weave of everyday life.

"The poetry in this collection explores insights that paradoxes point to in our lives, as energizing antidotes to bland generalities. What's the present, when past and future erupt into it? Can truth be found among our very errors? Can we speak beyond the limits of language? Do we all live in the same world, if different animals see it differently? There are many sorts of poems here, about love, family, farming, war, nature ... seeking a wider view of life in our age."--