Part autobiographical, the stories offer a depiction of the myriad world of jaded entrepreneurs, overzealous cops, karaoke fanatics, dog lovers, liberated coeds, and frustrated urbanites who move in and out of China's colorful neon-lit cities and dusty rural villages; transitioning from one world to the other. Red Guard Fantasies can be viewed as a corollary to the work of noted classical Chinese writers such as Pu Songling (1640-1715) and Wu Jingzi (1701-1754), who challenged ideas of Chinese society and culture through the use of allegory, satire, and the blending of realistic and fantastic elements, often leading the reader through a dream-like, fantasy state where the real and the surreal become one.

"These stories will last," said Raymond Carver of Shiloh and Other Stories when it was first published, and almost two decades later this stunning fiction debut and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award has become a modern American classic. In Shiloh, Bobbie Ann Mason introduces us to her western Kentucky people and the lives they forge for themselves amid the ups and downs of contemporary American life, and she poignantly captures the growing pains of the New South in the lives of her characters as they come to terms with feminism, R-rated movies, and video games. "Bobbie Ann Mason is one of those rare writers who, by concentrating their attention on a few square miles of native turf, are able to open up new and surprisingly wide worlds for the delighted reader," said Robert Towers in The New York Review of Books.

The settings for a lot of Jerome Johnson stories seem to take place on a gravel side road somewhere. They are absurd, comical, creative and just to the left of surreal.