"Their love story ended many years ago. He still writes her name as a
solution to crossword puzzle clues of suitable length." Alex Epstein's
miniature stories are indeed love stories, puzzles, stray clues to
puzzles he never finishes, the beginnings or ends of philosophical
treatises, parables, jokes, modernized legends, or perhaps a vivid
handful of images thrown together, then allowed to disperse. This is a
form of which he has been hailed as a master, a form as singular and
intricate as a collection of fingerprints. His stories are populated by
angels, chess players, mythical figures, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka,
lovers young and old, writers of disappearing languages; they are set in
airports, trains, the sites of legends, hotels, bookstores in countries
that no longer exist, dreams. In each, Epstein draws precisely the
smallest possible world, and revels in the great possibilities of a
single sentence.