[Leonard Michaels' stories in Going Places] present a weirdly heightened world where simple acts and feelings are translated into nightmarish reality by means of a distinctive style that gives substance to humorous, horrifying whimsy. "Only a dream, but so is life," remarks the narrator in "Sticks and Stones."… Just as in dreams, embarrassment, frustration, crazy violence and agony of mind expressed as torment of body are the stuff of these stories; but also as in dreams, everything is madly, pathetically funny—not to the dreamer of course, but to us who read the dream…. The balance between the plaintively humorous and the grotesquely sad is what gives full dimension to Michaels' fiction—that and a charged language in which every sentence surprises so vigorously that you will hold your breath just waiting to see if he can keep it up. He can.

Emily Dickinson said a good poem...