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 fugitives heartbreaking explanation for having beheaded his wife, alarming in that it almost makes sense.