A (dungeon) masterful short story in which Lipsyte, whom I've never read but will be looking forward to encountering again, paints a wincingly apt picture of a junior-high gaming group: the sadist DM, who kills his characters with rancid potatoes and rectal cancer; the goony kid brother who keeps rolling up new paladins named Valentine who all die in the same humiliating ways; the kid with the broken home who hearbreakingly throws himself into his thief characters to give himself something to value; and the narrator, playing a workhorse ranger and kind of a cipher but still a convincingly portrayed disaffected fourteen-year-old, suddenly awkward around his family and wishing for nothing more than to belong to the other gaming group, the one the kids in Gifted participate in, where they're all, like, 18th-level elvish wizards with high charisma who ride dragons and fought an army of frost giants. Meanwhile, the losers, the non-highfunctioning nerds from the wrong side of the tracks, languish in Kafka Campaign, getting murdered by kobolds and breaking their necks in the shower. God, this is almost socialist. New Yorker. ( )