"Ripped from the headlines" may be a promotional catchphrase in the world of prime-time television, but exploring the nooks and crannies of news and media remains a literary way of life for Jaffe (Beasts), the so-called "guerrilla writer" who provokes, titillates and amuses in this collection of 15 vignettes that he adapts from real-life news stories. The most startling by far is "Zealous Hysterectomies," an eerie foreshadowing of September 11, which describes the rise and spread of Islamic fundamentalism, the Taliban and Osama bin Laden during the civil war in Afghanistan—and also incorporates some brief, cheeky musings on the potential sexual benefits of hysterectomies. Jaffe's normal modus operandi is an entertaining mixture of the ironic and the macabre, a vein he mines most effectively in "Severed Hand," the story of a man who cuts his hand off with a power saw, then sues his doctors for not being able to reattach it. Most of the pieces follow a similar track—"Pizza Parlor" describes the attack of an ex-wife and her mother-in-law on the child molester she married, while "Faux" deals with the ramifications of duplicity as Jaffe explores what happens when cops use phony IDs to catch sex criminals on the Internet and HMOs use fake patients to test the services of hospitals they help manage. In this ingenious collection, Jaffe gets plenty of mileage from life's extensive menu of disturbed, deranged behaviors and the way the media covers the perpetrators. (Mar.)
