Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0979132010, Paperback)

In the surreal and darkly humorous stories of Alta Ifland's Elegy for a Fabulous World, the narrator recalls an eccentric family and their polyglot friends and neighbors--Hungarians, Germans, Romanians, Gypsies, Jews, Russians--surviving together in a space where fable, reality, and State-issued lies are impossible to untangle. In the book s second section the narratives immigrate to the United States, where the skepticism learned in fabulous youth infects and frustrates American attitudes and institutions. Real fictions of strange lands, Ifland's stories demonstrate a deep sympathy with the visionary outsider and a vital and provocative international point of view.