SWANNY'S WAYS is, among other things, a cattle-run of characters so warm they sit on your knee as you read. Through a series a character-rich vignettes linked by Swanny's quest for a lost love, Katz's fiction is a twirl of ontology, memory, love, and forgetting better even than Milan Kindera's best even.

This is a humorous way to let kids know about lice and what to do to prevent or get rid of an infestation. Most 1st or 2nd graders should be able to read this book with little help (there are a few words in it which they might need assistance with) and the illustrations are terrific.

My only complaint is that some of the rhyming text didn't flow smoothly which might be bothersome to young readers.

This book repeatedly emphasizes that germs are mean and that they are everywhere and that their sole purpose is to GET YOU. Very scary, actually. It puts them in your body, in your food, in the air and the miminally addressed topic of keeping yourself clean does not banish them. The next page just puts them all back somewhere else. It is not clear at all that handwashing, not letting other people sneeze on you, washing the floor, not leaving food overnight on the counter are effective ways to keep healthier. The emphasis is on a ton of very cute cartoony germs in multitudes. The health aspects are implied only--and poorly at that. Behaviors like nose-picking are RIDICULED. Not good for kids up to about age 10, especially if you're trying to teach health and cleanliness issues.

My daughter and I love this book. At 5 years old, she easily understood what this book was trying to tell her. She's 8 now and we still read it. We even use some of the terminology to remind each other to stay healthy. She'll say "Mama, you're being a 'meal skipper'". It is NOT a scary book and it is a fun way to talk about germs with your kids.

This book not only presents a serious topic in a very humorous and creative fashion, it contains some of the absolutely best germ cartoons I have ever seen. My first grader really enjoys it and I can't stop showing it off at work. I am an Infection Control RN specialist and find that it is perfect to communicate to healthcare workers the need to always wash their hands! I am getting copies for the hospital where I work. It is a super book!

The story is written well and is captures your attention, expecially so if you were born and raised in the upper Manhattan neighborhood known as Washinton Heights. Unfortunately, the author ran out of steam at the end and the story falls flat on its face with a rather amateurish close. I'd still recommend it for anyone who grew up there between 1950 and 1970

Dreary lumps of blather and sketchy doodles pretending to be hip experimental fictions. Embarrassing for author and reader alike.

Katz was born in the '30s, but this collection is the kind of thing that might have been spawned by a high school student who claimed that his god is Donald Barthelme. Unfortunately, though he might be industrious, he's still just a student, with a student's clumsiness and sophomoric sense of humor. If you slap your knee and guffaw at the idea of someone repeatedly calling Wonder Woman a "dike," then you might enjoy this book. (Yes, there's an experimental fiction about Wonder Woman here.) The sad truth about experiments is that so many of them are failures.

Understanding Steve Katz' particular brand of humor, as well as knowing when he's being totally serious, is not an easy task. But reading avant-garde fiction is never easy, and that's what I love about Katz; he's not easy to read. His fictions challenge our notions of what fiction should look, sound, and even act like.

In "Parcel of Wrists" he imagines himself receiving a package containing dozens of human wrists, but the return address seems to indicate the point of origin as a city that doesn't exist. So the author goes on a long quest to find the mysterious city while his wrists are at home brewing up a surprise for him when he returns. "Death of the Band" is a sharp satire of postmodern music. The protagonist is a detective searching for a famous composer who ends all of his musical compositions by killing the members of his orchestra.

Katz is a deft wordsmith whose stories have the rhythm of jazz compositions. "43 Fictions," which does not contain 43 fictions but instead refers to the author's obsession with the number 43 (it plays a prominent role in many of his books), is not the best Steve Katz book out there, but it's a good introduction to his virtuoso style and unique wit. Excerpting books like "Moving Parts" and "Exagggerations of Peter Prince" does not do the original books justice. "Saw" in particular does not lend itself to snippets for anthologies. I'd recommend "Stolen Stories" as a better introduction to Katz, but "43 Fictions" does present the breadth of his work in a condensed form, which is both a strength and a glaring weakness.