IN THE WORLD: A Collection Of Stories, Poems, And Reflections takes up where Richard Leiter's debut novel, Leaving Home, left off. The protagonist, Franklin Cohen, now finds himself living in a seedy Single Room Occupancy hotel on The Upper West Side of New York City, circa 1976, where he encounters a variety of colorful, dysfunctional characters. After describing some of them in the initial stories, the narrator then proceeds to meditate upon a variety of subjects ranging from the aesthetics of writing to what he perceives to be the pitiable state of the human species.
Although not strictly autobiographical, IN THE WORLD: A Collection Of Stories, Poems, And Reflections does indeed have a sort of loose autobiographical progression to it; with each piece, in its own way, infused with a sensibility at once amazed, and yet at the same time amused, by the antics of The Earth's inhabitants.