Cult favorite Tony Vigorito invokes a kind of chaos theory in Nine Kinds of Naked that gleefully turns any expectation of time, space, or plot on its head. A prisoner spins a playing card into a somersault, stirring a wind that becomes a tornado that takes off the roof of a church in nearby Normal, Illinois. Elizabeth Wildhack is born in that church and someday she will meet that prisoner, a man named Diablo, on the streets of New Orleans—where a hurricane-like Great White Spot hovers off the coast. But how is it all interconnected? "Comparisons of this novel to the works of Tom Robbins are both obvious and appropriate: the story meanders around in an entertaining manner, never getting too serious about itself; the characters are splendidly loopy, close to caricature but never quite reaching it; and the situations in which they find themselves are comic, dramatic, and everything in between."—Booklist

Blip Korterly kicks off a game of graffiti tag on a local overpass by painting a simple phrase: "Uh-oh." An anonymous interlocutor writes back: "When?" Blip slyly answers: "Just a couple of days." But what happens in just a couple of days? Blip is arrested; his friend, Dr. Flake Fountain—a molecular biologist—is drafted into a shadow-government research project conducting experiments on humans. The virus being tested—cleverly called "the Pied Piper"—renders its victims incapable of symbolic capacity; that is, incapable of communication. Is this biological weaponry? What would happen if it were let loose on the world? Does a babbling populace pose a threat or provide an opportunity for social evolution?This novel's absurd, larger-than-life characters speak in exuberant prose that is as satirical as it is playful, as full of implications as it is full of mirth. It's no wonder Just a Couple of Days has become an underground cult classic. This grassroots...