Joyce and Marshall Harriman are in the midst of a contentious divorce, but still sharing a cramped, overmortgaged Brooklyn apartment with their two children. On the morning of September 11, Joyce departs for Newark to catch a flight to San Francisco, and Marshall, after dropping the kids at daycare, heads for his office in the World Trade Center. She misses her flight and he's late for work, but on that grim day, in devastated city, among millions seized by fear and grief, each thinks the other is dead, and each is secretly, shamefully, gloriously happy. As their bitter divorce is further complicated by anthrax scares, suicide bombs, foreign wars, and the stock market collapse, they suffer, in ways unexpectedly personal and increasingly ludicrous, the many strange ravages of our time. In this astonishing black comedy, Kalfus suggests how our nation's public calamities have encroached upon our most private illusions.

""Kalfus is an endlessly ingenious writer...Features some of the best fiction writing yet about September 11. A brilliant comedy of manners...about the way a conflict takes on a logic and momentum of its own."

Ken Kalfus is the author of a novel, The Commissariat of Enlightenment, and the short story collections, Thirst, which won the Salon Book Award, and Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. A Disorder Peculiar to the Country was a National Book Award finalist for 2006