Fiction. The facts are simple enough: In September, 1909, a relatively unknown Freud spent a week in New York City, en route to a lecture series upstate at Clark University. The air ranged from muggy to stifling. The museum exhibition on antiquities, the one he had high hopes for, proved substandard. The crowds on the street smelled of industrial fluids and sweat. Even friendly faces made him squirm. The conductor on a tram tried to be empathetic: he ordered the crowd to make room for 'the old man.' But Freud did not see himself as old, not yet. Thus begins this off-the-wall collection from the author of The History of Forgetting. Pitched somewhere between fiction and essay, between short story and novella, FREUD IN CONEY ISLAND AND OTHER TALES uses what are possibly actual facts from the eminent psychoanalyst's life to produce beautifully meandering engagements with topics ranging from the work of Lissitzky to laserographic confocal search methods to the ideas of Freud himself.