The Elephant Vanishes

The narrator of the title story - obsessed with the unaccountable disappearance of an elephant from the local elephant house - thinks he may have glimpsed what only seems impossible . . . the protagonist of another story knows that she has taken part in an impossible reality when she telepathically slays a small green monster who has just proposed marriage to her . . . a store clerk's reply to a letter of complaint reveals the vast clutter of his own thoughts, at the center of which hangs his theory of "The Nobility of Imperfection". . sleeplessness becomes a foretaste of death for a young mother. . . a man's life is invaded by TV People who may be illusory but nonetheless have a surer sense of what's really going on than he does. . . a young man invited into the carefully preserved room of a stranger's absent daughter begins to sense the armature of fiction beneath the malleable surface of recollection.