The Temple of Iconoclasts

From an armchair in England, Rosenblum hatches a complicated plot to return the world to the year 1580-reintroducing ruffs, doublets, codpieces, and sundry period diseases. By sheer force of will, Littlefield discovers that he's able to crystallize table salt into the shapes of "chickens and other small animals." Babson founds an international organization with the declared aim of annulling the law of gravity. These are only a few of the dozens of eccentrics, visionaries, and downright crackpots who populate the pages of Juan Rodolfo Wilcock's charming fiction in the form of a biographical dictionary. Temple's brief portraits blend mordant satire and profound imaginative sympathy, taking in the whole dazzling spectrum of human folly-including a handful of colors that only Wilcock's Swiftian eye could possibly have perceived. Called "of the greatest and strangest . . . writers of this century" by none other than Roberto Bolaño.