This is Truhlar's fifth major collection of literary works, and includes 10 tantalizing fictions:

The Better Way

Stet

The Pitch

Skin Shoe, Long Pig

Assimulator

Earfull

The Desert of the Real Itself

Ebisu

Phoning the Past

Fact Simile

"...a collection of 10 urban daymares...the stories are refreshingly, unflinchingly unsettling."
- Mark Young, Scene Magazine

"This is a very well written collection which achieves a complex vision of cultural deterioration."
- Lance La Rocque, Paragraph

"Richard Truhlar writes unsettling prose. Everything in these pieces moves around with manic intensity: characters dissolve into one another; grotesque fantasies interrupt quotidian anxieties; time expands and contracts. The stories seem composed like pieces of music, with repetitions, variations on themes, but without conventional plots or narrative lines. - Eileen Manion,
Books in Canada

"This is distinctive and compelling writing...A reader senses that Truhlar likes to set himself challenges, either intentionally or intuitively, and then revel in the discovered possibilities of fiction, in an inventive, skilled, and evocative way." - Prairie Fire

"It's comforting to know Canadian writers are still producing literary works that don't leave the reader yawning with every turn of the page. Instead, Truhlar leaves the reader questioning himself and society in general...The Pitch is a work that supplies enjoyment for the reader who is bored with the average grade school writing and its sophisticated tone is something people with a passion for contemporary literature will be grateful for." - Kimberly Butler, The Gazette