In the title story a Los Angeles Young Republican relates, with strangely hilarious affectlessness, his night out at a Keith Jarrett concert with is terminmally nihilistic punk friends Gimlet, Cheese, and Big, In "My Appearance" a very famous actresss frets and schemes how to avoid being made the butt of a late-night talk-show host's notoriously slippery jokes, while :Little Expressionless Animals" gives us a three-year streak on a game show, finally halted by the contestant's idiot savant brother. "Lyndon" renders LBJ as seen by a fictional aide touchingly up close and vunerable, a man crushed by responibility. The concluding novella, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" is a bravura performance that draws on the resources of parody, pastiche, homage, fantasy, stories-within-stories, superrealism(just to cite a few of its techniques) to anatomize the kind of fiction appropriate to our late, but not yet exhausted, literary era.