We all know Herman Melville, Jack Kerouac, Thomas Pynchon, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes and Pam Houston. Now meet their metaphysical ukuleles. Mixing the flair of literary invention with real events in each writer's life, Carswell takes the non-fiction of some the most famous writer's lives and turns it into exquisite fiction, with a ukulele thrown in for good measure. The stories in this truly one-of-a-kind collection delightfully blur the line between what is life and what is literature.