Kotzwinkle presents the routine at the magazine with wit and invention, and describes the city streets with an expressionistic poetry of urban madness that draws on the same fabulist imagination that informs the stories that the characters write. The "plot" almost seems like an inconvenience. Kotzwinkle has centered the narrative on a pornographic film actress/pre-classic French language poet, Mitzi Mouse (nee Mouskewitz), who semi-accidentally shoots a mobster who controls a porn empire when he refuses to let her work on poetry on her coffee break. Fleeing from Tony Baloney's (nee Bulloni) henchmen (whom Mitzi calls "The Hounds of Mordacity"), the staff enters the frenzied world they have previously been reporting on from a safe distance, shifting from spectators to participants in a phantasmagoric pageant of monstrously comic effects. The structure of this section of the narrative is a double chase, with the writers and mobsters seemingly in...