Whistler's Mother's Son collects over 100 prose pieces of varying length and styles—from minimalism to satire to noir to children's tale to abstraction to surrealism. Featuring parodies, standardized tests, nursery-rhyme anxieties, fables, riddles, collaborations, conundrums, rescued clichés, abominations-in-training, dark Americana, existential misdemeanors, misbegotten mysteries, identity crises, optimistic nihilism, formal experimentation, and polyrhythmic prose, its cast of characters includes Hamlet, Gertrude Stein, Amelia Earhart, Fred Flintstone, Mr. Mondrian, a little girl whose mother takes up with a smelly old man, embattled aunties and uncles, a man with two mustaches, several hard-boiled dicks, and an eternally confused Peter Cherches.