The stories in John Haskell's Trying to Be wrestle in exhilarating ways with the relationships between fiction and other arts- painting, film, dance- in a manner that feels natural and seamless. Painter, narrator, spectator, reader, writer- it doesn't matter which. What matters is how they speak and think and create in relation to each other, always shifting, always refashioning themselves. Haskell's narrators are porous- to these other art forms, to the past, to other people and characters. It is perhaps this permeability that forms them, and part of what forms the stories themselves.