Mrs. Dorothy Bliss is an old woman in her early 80s living alone in a retirement community near Miami Beach, Florida, after her husband's death due to cancer.

The story keeps introducing various new men in her life, such as Hector Camerando, a jai alai pro who helps Mrs. Bliss with some tips on dogs, and Tommy Auveristas, an imposter.

[2][3] Elkin had published ten novels, five short-story collections, and various novellas and non-fiction articles in various magazines and papers during the course of his writing career, which began in the 1950s.

[2] Walter Goodman, a television critic for The New York Times, mentions in his review that "[the book] may not be Stanley Elkin's best, but it is a smart, generous, melancholy, funny, even elegiac work by a prodigious practitioner".

[5][6] Publishers Weekly writes that "Elkin is at his best here, blessed with the gift of one-liner insight and a definite, if reluctantly exercised, ability to tug on a reader's heartstrings".