A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane

This is Barry Yourgrau's debut book, the one that put him on the literary map, where he remains a landmark of imaginative prowess.

In A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane, the author focuses his wide-awake subconscious mind on thematic standards--father, mother, lover, sex, the imagination itself--and recasts them into madcap parable, surrealistic fables, and grotesque fantasies. Here are dreamscapes compressed into razor-sharp prose, where a twelve inch girl lolls in her date's spaghetti, where a warrior steps out of the Iliadas an intruder in a backyard swimming pool, where a man climbs inside a cow on a bet.

Hilarious, subversive, and uniquely entertaining, Yourgrau treats readers to a circus of surreal, impish beauty, poignant flashes of tragedy, and a headstand of everyday reality.