David Vardeman has become known as a genius of the short form; the short form, for Vardeman being any length from a few pages to a few hundred, in the case of this book hovering about 100 or so for the first four stories and 20 or so for the last story--Vardemanian humor implicit in the title Zeitgeist being given less shrift than, say, the story Corn, the second longest in the book ("Watering corn was their code, in social situations, for needing to urinate, no delay.") Here's a typical Vardemanian moment, chosen at random: "Sometimes, Irv, you just want the naked man out of your house." Vardeman is genius of the mundane absurd.