Gates of Eden - Ethan Coen

In this national bestseller now in paperback, a contract kill is botched when the hit man phones his boss for further instructions on a wire-tapped phone; a private investigator tangles with a thug and has an ear bitten off; and middle-aged man beheads his wife, then calmly offers an explanation of how she drove him to do it. A distinctive voice and an offbeat worldview...All of these stories take place in Coen Brothers Land, a parallel universe similar to our own--except it's weirder, funnier, and better edited. -- New York Times Book Review The fiction debut of one of the most distinctive filmmakers working today, Ethan Coen. In Gates of Eden , Ethan Coen exhibits on the printed page the striking, twisted, yet devastatingly on-target vision of modern American life familiar from his movies. The world within the world we live in comes alive in fourteen brazenly original tragicomic short stories--from the Midwest mob war that fizzles due to the principals' ineptness to the trials of a deaf private eye with a blind client to a fugitive's heartbreaking explanation for having beheaded his wife, alarming in that it almost makes sense.