In this national bestseller now in paperback, a contract kill is botched when the hit man phones his boss for further instructions on a wire-tapped phone; a private investigator tangles with a thug and has an ear bitten off; and middle-aged man beheads his wife, then calmly offers an explanation of how she drove him to do it.

"A distinctive voice and an offbeat worldview...All of these stories take place in Coen Brothers Land, a parallel universe similar to our own--except it's weirder, funnier, and better edited." -- New York Times Book Review

The fiction debut of one of the most distinctive filmmakers working today, Ethan Coen.

In Gates of Eden, Ethan Coen exhibits on the printed page the striking, twisted, yet devastatingly on-target vision of modern American life familiar from his movies. The world within the world we live in comes alive in fourteen brazenly original tragicomic short stories--from the Midwest mob war that fizzles due to the principals' ineptness to the trials of a deaf private eye with a blind client to a fugitive's heartbreaking explanation for having beheaded his wife, alarming in that it almost makes sense.