In 1970/71, while being occupied as usual with her own writing, she "began to dream about and to sense, while awake, some other life, or vision, or personality" (p.187), and she wrote a story which was so strange to her that she felt it was not her own.

Oates emphasizes that "Fernandes drifted into my life at a time when I was in normal health" (p.188) and "retreated when his story seemed to be complete" (p.189); and she also admits that so far she has not been able to comprehend, to her own satisfaction, what really happened (p.189).

[5] In a review for the Los Angeles Times, Alan Cheuse found the collection pretentious, singling out "Plagiarized Material" as the only "truly successful" story.

"[1] In the Library Journal, Bruce Allen wrote that the collection was too ambitious for its medium, with only "Loss" and "Distance" being easily recognizable as Oates' work.

[7] In Studies in Short Fiction, Sanford Pinsker noted that a few of the stories, particularly "Plagiarized Material", were written in a "reflexive trickster" style associated with Jorge Luis Borges.