Horace Manifold, a mild-mannered professor of English at a college in the Midwest, discovers a strange phenomenon in the course of writing a novel. It seems that whenever he describes an event that occurs in the life of his protagonist, Mortimer Fandangle, that event subsequently happens to him as well. When he publishes an excerpt of the novel in an upscale literary journal, one that demonstrates this Fellini-esque device, he is awarded a "Pre-Pulitzer Prize," and is later hailed as “having forever altered the face of American literature.” He then embarks on a series of exotic adventures in tandem with his protagonist, including giving assistance to the Mexican government, performing mass hypnosis on crowds, and getting involved in a ménage à trois. He does, however, manage to finish his novel, which turns out to be this very book.

Morris Berman is a poet, novelist, essayist, social critic, and cultural historian. He has written twenty-four books and nearly 200 articles, and has taught at a number of universities in Europe, North America, Chile, and Mexico. He won the Governor’s Writers Award for Washington State in 1990, and was the first recipient of the annual Rollo May Center Grant for Humanistic Studies in 1992. In 2000, The Twilight of American Culture was named a “Notable Book” by the New York Times Book Review, and in 2013 he received the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity from the Media Ecology Association. Dr. Berman lives in Mexico.