The Divine Farce

(Leapfrog Press) Locked together in a tiny cell, three people grow intimately close, even loving, in this allegorical interrogation of human existence. When the narrator — a thin man named Sage — digs a hole in the concrete, the three of them push out only to lose one another in the mad mob of other cave dwellers. As Sage joins the mob, he finds himself beginning to take a kind of comfort in it. Yet when he stares at the light holes in the ceiling, he cannot help wondering whether eternal freedom or eternal isolation waits behind them. Graziano is an associate professor of psychology and of neuroscience at Princeton University. He is the author of the novel The Love Song of Monkey and the novellas Hiding Places and The Seclusion Zone.