Nude in Tub — G.K. Wuori

Wuori fiction is something entirely and wildly its own. Like Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, Mark Richard, Lewis Nordan, Wuori doesn't care to mollycoddle the reader. He's here, in this daring debut collection, to reflect what's on his mind: America's fascination with violence, with sex, with racism, with joyful immortality.

Set in the northernmost corner of Maine, in a town "usually omitted from cheap maps," Nude in Tub is about a young couple who make love on La-Z-Boys in the middle of a highway, about an old woman who finds a pine tree growing from her leg, about newlyweds who paint their whole house black and themselves white, and about several more stripped-down others, including, of course, a nude in tub.

Descendants of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburgers, Wuori's Quillifarkeagans are Americans at the millenium, good citizens whose reality has been tweaked, twitted, quirked, smirked and found to be grimly goofy. These people - each of them caught in their own startling moment of nakedness - all live by the same credo: If you're in trouble, we'll help. But we'll still laugh like hell.