“Finkle is that rare writer who achieves great effects without seeming to try.” – Roger Ebert, film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times “Lovely writing, smart and insightful. David Finkle’s stories have a wonderful sense of how media types talk and think, and the often unintended consequences of how they behave.” – Avery Corman, author of Kramer vs. Kramer “In David Finkle’s exhilarating first-person stories, you hear the bittersweet hubbub of Manhattan: the clash of hilarity and envy, ambition and confusion, energy and terror, grandiosity and exhaustion, gay and straight, chatter and solitude. In his deft hands, ‘the isle of joy’ becomes the isle of irony. Finkle’s droll and knowing prose snaps, crackles, and pops with the high and low brow.” – John Lahr, senior drama critic, The New Yorker "What a great pleasure it is to read Finkle's candid stories. In a period when cynicism seems to have literature in a stranglehold, Finkle's modest and pure voice soars." – Daniel Klein, coauthor of Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar... Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes