"Only when something is dead can we possess it. Only when it"s dead can we really control it." Haberman is a social worker in Harlem. It"s an appalling job with brutal paperwork, a nit-picking boss, and clients whose lives are relentlessly depressing. He is deeply entrenched in his resentment of anyone who aspires to be something more, who creates and gives and believes in life. Then one day he meets his destiny: a limbless, mentally deficient man named Brodski who appears to have a spark of appreciation for art. A relationship begins, an emotionally intimate relationship in which Haberman travels out to the borders of his sanity and beyond, and Brodski desperately grows and changes and reaches for Beauty--all without words, in a bleak endgame that Samuel Beckett might"ve imagined. "The Nihilesthete speaks with a singular honesty, power and eloquence about our spiritually diminished modern world," wrote the Mid-American Review.