A dynamically shifting vision of the world made visible in intricate explorations that seem to recall Kafka’s castle halls, and the twists and turns in Borges’s labyrinth.Utilizing the ancient tradition of the parable, Lawrence Fixel presents narrators in settings with which they are uncomfortable, in situations they don’t understand, confronting a range of potential resolutions that somehow obliquely reflect the issues and values of our peculiar time and place.With uncompromising curiosity and ferocious intelligence, Fixel’s essays, parables and prose poems take part the everyday world in order to examine its most basic building blocks, to turn them this way and that, to imagine how they might have been regarded in the time of the Pharaohs, or to conjure up a reality without them. The most insignificant object or act—a shovel, a key, a knock on a door—becomes the starting point for an exploration into the nature of existence itself.