A German Picturesque

Haunting in their tone, brilliant in their images--very like fantastic presences moving across glass--the twenty-one fictions in this startling debut collection seem both inexplicably familiar and like no writing we have seen before. The opening story leads us through a kaleidoscopic series of thoughts and memories around the act of writing a letter. Another, an intricately structured document of documents--household inventories, daily calendars, property deeds, an announcement--suggests the reality overflowing these mundane markers of our lives. Yet another traces the histories of five artifacts, while at the same time slyly assembling five miniature biographical portraits.