One Hot Ticket

Karl Taro Greenfeld's new collection of stories, NowTrends, is fashioned like a travel guide. It is diminutive, with three alternate scenic covers, designed to fit easily in the front pouch of your backpack. It feels like an adventure before you even open it.

Ok, reader, it asks you. Where do you want to go?

Destinations include, but are not limited to, Mt. Everest, Indonesia, California, China, and the Sea of Japan. Your tour guides will be a 15-year-old Chinese gymnastic prodigy, a Japanese Imperial Navy Officer, a high-priced dominatrix who dreams of Australia, a slew of journalists on befuddling assignments, and a writer who carries a jug of his own urine. You and your host will visit these locations in times of war and prosperity, in weather both frigid and surf-worthy, and, once you depart, there will be no returns.

You would have to be a fool to want one.

The stories in NowTrends are some of the most engrossing and fully realized to appear in years. Readers of contemporary fiction should rejoice in even further proof that we, as human beings, are still as skilled as we've ever been at looking at one another and boldly considering, compassionately imagining. There is no evidence here of permanent damage done to the modern psyche by the Internet, social networking, or political correctness. Greenfeld's investment in his characters, both the heroes and the fools, is as sustained and total as our finest literary ancestors, and this book is a master class.

A quick glance at Greenfeld's biography gives up the secret that the deck is stacked in his favor, as he has visited many of the places in NowTrends himself. His work as a travel writer is award winning and expansive (see pieces in New York Times, Lonely Planet, and Time, for starters), and this penchant for journalism renders his details precise and new, full of insider knowledge that is not likely to appear on any brochure. Consider this opening description of Mt. Everest, for example, in the story "Client":

Base camp was wretched purgatory, tents billowing in omnipresent wind, refuse piled in terraced mounds, empty Styrofoam cups making popping noises as wind bounced them along stony earth, and a dozen steps in each direction were ziggurats of frozen shit, as thousands of climbers who passed through every year left feces in their wake.

When one thinks of the highest peak on Earth, they are not likely to think of humanity's most lowly activities, but this sense of a dark human underbelly beneath seemingly exotic locales is paramount to nearly every story in this book. A trip to China to interview a celebrity, for instance, may end up with you bartering for the life of a friend who's been mysteriously imprisoned, as in the title story "NowTrends." A lucky occurrence at a Tokyo nightclub, one in which you are saved by a beautiful stranger, may end with you desperately trying to score speed for a prostitute by chasing down a sketchy guy in leather pants named Kimi. Or, as the narrator phrases it in the amazing story "Mistakes Were Made, Errors Happened":

Here's what my day looked like after I gave Kimi the money, waited around and then went to look for him.

NK=not finding Kimi

K=finding Kimi

X represents a medium-sized trip and

XXX represents a long trip:

XXX NK XXX NK XXX NK XXX NK XXX NK.

This type of playful narration is found throughout a collection that is often its most hilarious when you least expect it. "Is this weird?" the narrator of the story "Silver" asks us out of the blue. "Sometimes I would go to the freezer in the little office kitchen and scoop up a mug of ice cubes. Then I would head to the bathroom where I would dump them in the urinal and piss on them." And "As for the rest of my job," he tells us, "it was starting to depress me."

So...