Mary McCarthy (1912-1989) was a short-story writer, bestselling novelist, essayist, and a social and art critic. A member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, she was the author of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Venice Observed, and Birds of America, among other books.

"You keep reading this hypnotic novel the way a sleeping person wants to keep dreaming." — Publisher's Weekly"Alfau's inventive 'comedy of gestures' is, like any hall of mirrors fun house, disorienting, maddening, and greatly entertaining. Ithas everything any modern best-seller needs: murder, incest, fallen priests, Iascivious nuns, a couple of suicides, several mysteries, the living dead, pimps and whores and poets, locales that shift from China to the Philippines to the Caribbean to Europe." — Washington Post