"Praise for Juan Martinez: "A little out of the ordinary ... He takes this very unnatural environment and changes it into a landscape."--Hannah Tinti "I loved it."--Etgar Keret These are the best Americans, the worst Americans. In these stories (these cities, these people) there are labyrinths, rivers, wildernesses. Voices sound slightly different than ex-pected. There's humor, but it's going to hurt. In "On Paradise," a petshop manager flies with his cat to Las Vegas to meet his long-lost mother and grandmother, only to find that the women look exactly like they did forty years before. In "The Spooky Japanese Girl is There For You," the spooky Japanese girl (a ghost) is there for you, then she is not. These refreshing and invigorating stories of displacement, exile, and identity, of men who find themselves confused by the pres-ence or absence of extraordinary women, jump up, demand to be read, and send the reader back to the earth changed: reminded from these short stories how big the world is. Juan Martinez was born in Bucaramanga, Colombia, and has lived in Orlando, Florida, and Las Vegas, Nevada. He now lives in Chicago with his wife, the writer Sarah Kokernot, and their son and two cats. He's an assistant professor at Northwestern University. His work and has appeared in Glimmer Train, McSweeney's, Ecotone, Huizache, TriQuarterly, Conjunctions, the Cossack Review, the Santa Monica Review, National Public Radio's Selected Shorts, Norton's Sudden Fiction Latino, and elsewhere"--