SOURCE: Review of Greetings from Earth, by Scott Bradfield. Publishers Weekly 243, no. 8 (19 February 1996): 209.

In the following review of Greetings from Earth, the critic remarks that Bradfield's stories are inventive, startling, and effective.

Bradfield (What's Wrong With America) is an acutely—sometimes painfully—unsentimental chronicler of our times in these inventive short stories [in Greetings from Earth]. Only eight of these stories are new to publication, but all are startling and effective. Bradfield often uses animals in his fiction, sometimes as recurring metaphors, and sometimes as characters. For example, Larry Chambers keeps dreaming about wolves in “The Dream of the Wolf” while his domestic situation deteriorates. One of the high points of this collection is a biography of a depressed, somewhat superior dog named “Dazzle,” who dislikes his owners (“The Canis familiaris utters a guttural diphthong, much like the Mandarin Chinese diphthong, only less enunciated,” muses Dazzle when their...