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Harold Jaffe is a master of the disembodied voice. These fictions-transgressive, political, dryly comic-are grounded in an ancient tradition, that of the speech of the storyteller. Interlocutors talk as if out of dark caves, and the result is a marvel of conversation that takes the reader to places somehow beyond the "real world," only to comment, often searingly, upon its absurdities.

Time: 20 minutes into the future Setting: The treacherous margins of post-industrial society Cast: Sexual outlaws, serial murderers, techno-freaks, gender benders, rogue cops, punk anarchists Content: Horror, outrage, razor-sharp satire, virtuosic writing and visual beauty by two of the most original contemporary American artists, in collaboration In this uncanny collection of 12 stories, Harold Jaffe-author of Eros Anti-Eros, Beasts, and Madonna & Other Spectacles and Norman Conquest, artist illustrator extraordinaire, have produced a book with the precision of a laser and the charge of a land mine.

Harold Jaffe was among the most admired and versatile writers in the US for several decades, having written fiction, non-fiction, "docufiction," drama, and now, in The Infected Desert, what he called documentary poems. His subject is the Israeli war on the Palestinians which Jaffe addresses both through brief, tensely discerning free verse poems and actual documents which he reconstitutes so that the subtexts are revealed. Despite the cruel and maddening suppression of truth-telling about the war that is pervasive in the US, Jaffe had the courage to break through in order to do what documentary poems must do: "Tell truth to power."

A collection of writings by angry young men of Latino extraction. In Rick Najera's Hollywood Heretic, the hero observes that the film, 'Saving Private Ryan, ' had no Latinos, yet Latinos are the most decorated of all groups, "but obviously we are camera-shy when it comes to World War II and Korea."

As in Harold Jaffe's two previous "docufiction" collections, False Positive and 15 Serial Killers, the author of Terror-Dot-Gov selects then "treats" his texts such that the reader is incapable of distinguishing between fact and fiction. That ambiguity permits Jaffe to cunningly tease out the contradictions and subtexts of official "news" or "information" and torque it into what it so often is fundamentally: jingoism, xenophobia and propaganda. Jaffe's subject in Terror-Dot-Gov is not the everywhere-represented "illicit" terrorism so much as "licit," institutionalized terrorism, and he assaults his subject from multiple angles: razor-sharp satire, precisely cadenced rhetoric, faux-reportage, and "unsituated" dialogues (Jaffe's term, referring to his trademark talking heads with perfect pitch). The result is virtuosic and paradoxical: a prodigious display of firepower-in the cause of peace.