Only What Is

A man falls in love with a woman who exists only in his dreams.

A young couple walks the same street day after day, the husband always talking and the wife-doing what?

An artist sits sketching in the cemetery of a mental hospital, and wishes he''ll someday be buried there.

A hopeful businessman opens a shop in a location that is doomed.

A vampire craves, not his victims'' blood, but their personalities.

Eighty-nine blog posts, the best of the author''s first year in the blogosphere.

Eighty-nine glimpses of life imagined, experienced, felt, cherished, and above all, clearly seen. Here are stories of people yearning for companionship, parables of the unwittingly enlightened and the unknowingly benighted, landscapes of desolate beauty, moments of everyday tenderness and of sudden comic recognition, transcending the line between fiction and nonfiction.

As up-to-date as the blogosphere, yet reaching back for its roots to ancient Taoist tales and medieval Japanese pillow books.

Another step forward in the evolution of ''a spectacular writer, a distinctive voice to be heard" (*The Detroit News*).