A baboon rescued from medical experimentation leads to a quandary for one of Darwin's descendants. A public health officer falls in love with a Christian Scientist. A man whose wife has disappeared attends a support group for widowers. A locksmith has an ulterior motive for giving his all to a community cause. Again and again in these stories, the road to self-discovery is paved with contradiction and imposture.

In the realm of the short story, Jacob M. Appel is our great moral diagnostician: unfailingly clear-eyed and empathetic, alive to the humor and heartwrenching irony of our shortcomings and their pathological sequelae.

This edition reprints the eight stories included in The Magic Laundry (Snake Nation Press, 2014) and includes six additional previously uncollected stories.