The special music of this book is counterpoint of powers: being and nothingness, time and eternity, joy and suffering, despair and hope, memory and mystery, creation and destruction, fiction and history. Bilingual novelist, poet, critic, essayist, translator, surfictionist, critifictionist, former paratrooper, fanatic golfer and gambler, Federman is the author of some two dozen books. His novels have been translated into fourteen languages, and have been awarded numerous literary prizes. Recently retired from SUNY-Buffalo, where he was the Melodia E. Jones Distinguished Professor of Literature, Federman now resides in San Diego where he continues to write and explore new modes of narrative. His most recent books, ‘The precipec and Other Catastrohpes’ [a collection of plays], ‘Aunt Rachel’s Fur’ [a novel improvised in sad laughter]. Federman is a member of no group, no tribe, no fraction. If the author of ‘Loose Shoes’ were, however, to seek his brothers, he would surely find them among that company of saints who have forever been doing exactly the same thing: dreating, in joyful, disinterested confidence, a vision of man from the material of personal history and from the gleanings of a fully exercised moral imagination. Each work by such writers will exhibit its own exacting economy, and will, in that, refuse understanding by means other than its own. German translation by Martin Arndorfer: OFFENE SCHUHE.