Bruce Jay Friedman opened his Collected Short Fiction (1995) with an anecdotal reference to his mother's confession of dropping the young author on his head when he was two years old, thereby accounting for his trademark "tilted" quality of work. In a confession of his own in this introduction Friedman revealed that "most of these stories were written to puzzle things out for myself." For example, one of his earliest short stories, titled "The Subversive," was written to relieve him of a troubling experience he had in the U.S. Air Force concerning his shattered image of a fellow serviceman. After writing this somewhat autobiographical piece, altered by what he called "lies and other adornments," Friedman said, "I wasn't quite as troubled." Friedman's fiction often leaves the reader with the same puzzled or troubled feeling that inspired the author to tell the story. The discomfiture is passed on to...