… 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. The Elephant Vanishes invites us to see what might otherwise remain hidden: the sure existence of the inexplicable – both chaotic and comic – in the demure dailiness of life. It is a continually surprising altogether remarkable collection of stories.