Ever dreamed of strolling through a Dalí print? Or stepping into a fairy tale? Open A Man Jumps Out of an Airplaneand experience the rush of having reality yanked from underfoot.

This is Barry Yourgrau's debut book, the one that put him on the literary map, where he remains a landmark of imaginitive prowess. In A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane,the author focuses his wide-awake subconscious mind on thematic standards--father, mother, lover, sex, the imagination itself--and recasts them into madcap parable, surrealistic fables, and grotesque fantasies. Here are dreamscapes compressed into razor-sharp prose, where a twelve inch girl lolls in her date's spaghetti, where a warrior steps out of the Iliadas an intruder in a backyard swimming pool, where a man climbs inside a cow on a bet. Hilarious, subversive, and uniquely entertaining, Yourgrau treats readers to a circus of surreal, impish beauty, poignant flashes of tragedy, and a headstand of everyday reality.