Five stories are set in one New York apartment building where young Davey watches his neighbours' lives unfold, and are inspired by classic stories by Kafka, Fitzgerald, Auden, Singer and Hawthorne. Gathered under one roof are weird and wonderful characters such as Benjamin Button, the mysterious misfit who is born a grizzled old man and grows younger, fading away towards infancy, and Wakefield who abandons his family to move over the road and spy on them through binoculars for twenty years. And upstairs in the penthouse, the proctologist with a wire-brush moustache and movie villain's limp plays Icarus and Daedalus with his misfit son. In this brilliantly inventive collection, Gabriel Brownstein brings alive the human tragedies that lurk beneath the bizarre.