In this arresting and richly imaginative collection of twelve stories. Gail Jones explores the role of obsession the inescapable loves and torments she calls fetishes – in the lives of both the famous and the ordinary. Structured around a series of lyrical echoes and repeated images, her stories weave fact and speculation to recreate little-known events in the lives of such figures as Marcel Proust, Walt Whitman, and Elvis Presley that may have motivated their art and obsessed them as individuals.