I read Yu’s Third Class Superhero and enjoyed it, and I looked forward to reading his first novel.

Yu has included many clever nods to fanboys and fangirls in this book, including the very idea you can live in a universe that is a narrative structure that people obsess over. It’s a funny, clever, very meta read. It’s a book about time travel that manages not to make time travel sexy, which is more entertaining than it sounds.

What people really want, Yu seems to tell us, despite our resistance to it and running away from it, is a real life. The trick is recognizing the value in the one we’ve got.

This was a weird trippy story, funny and disturbed from the title on down. The narrative loops around on itself (okay, that was a lie; those drugs don’t exist) and questions its own believability. If you are a sucker for an unreliable narrator, you’ll have to read this book, because Jane Charlotte is your girl.

Janes’s story is fascinating. Paranoia? Check. Delusions and self sabotage? Check. Insane (insanely clever?) bureaucracy — with units named things like “The Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons”? Check.

Ruff manages to ask some interesting and serious questions along the way. What’s evil? What about redemption? What should you be doing with your life? His characters make a distinction between fighting crime and fighting evil, and it doesn’t seem like splitting hairs.

If you like near future or alternate reality stories, want off kilter and a fast pace, I highly recommend Bad Monkeys. If you are like me, you’ll find yourself wanting parts of Ruff’s world to be real, then wondering what it says about you that you think that. Also: if mandrills didn’t creep you out before, now they will.

This is apparently the fourth book Ruff has written. I’ll be on the lookout for the previous three, and I eagerly await the next one, which he’s writing now.

This collection of thirteen stories is hard to describe. There are fables (“A Fable Ending in the Sound of a Thousand Parakeets” is stunning), some are science fiction (“The Lady with the Pet Tribble” is probably best example of Brockmeier’s humor), and one is a choose your own adventure format (but is not in the least tacky). The stories aren’t all the same format or genre, aren’t more or less the same length — what they have in common is that they are well written, and they’ll make you think.

I imagine his stories would appeal to fans of short fiction that aren’t necessarily fans of genre fiction, as the stories are more about connections or loss or unintended consequences than they are about space travel or techological wizardry. What they seem to have in common is that they are quiet stories that burrow away in your head.

This is Brockmeier’s fourth book, though the first I’ve read. I’ll be looking for the others based on the strength of this collection. Definitely recommended.

This collection of fifteen short stories surprised me. Individual stories — the ideas in them — stayed with me in ways I didn’t expect. There’s a museum security guard who transports otherwordly spirits, a discussion of hungry ghosts, an alien crash landing in the woods, and a kid who finds an angel in the form of a horse among others, but saying that makes the stories seem louder than they are.

Wolf’s stories aren’t loud, aren’t outlandishly over the top, aren’t hard to believe in the ways the list of characters might make them seem. They also aren’t quite as riveting as the subject matter might suggest (if you are into the supernatural or extraterrestrial). They quietly go about their business, moving from the beginning to the middle to the end, and while not really being all that impressive still managed to have an influence, to get me thinking about communication or the power of wishes or what is really important about consciousness or patience.

At the beginning of each story Wolf tells us a little about the story — the germ of an idea it sprang from, or some question she was turning over. I liked this, and I’ll confess it got me to keep reading when maybe I otherwise would have put the book down. I appreciated the effort of her sharing, and it made me curious to learn how the stories played out.

So it’s a quiet book, good but not stellar, full of unusual stories that are good companions for an afternoon though their ideas are stronger than their language. If this sounds like your kind of thing, probably is.

Note: I received this book through LibraryThing Early Reviewers. That means I didn’t pay for it. Participation in LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer is not dependent on writing a positive review; writing a review is all that is expected.

A few days after I finished reading Dangerous Space, I cranked up some tunes to get through a tedious bit of work on the computer. Not far into the first song (I’ll confess it was something from Fall Out Boy’s latest album, but the specific doesn’t really matter) I stopped, stunned, and realized: music sounds different now. Damn.

Yeah, this story collection is that good. [If you've already read Solitaire you may have experienced your own "damn, she's good" Eskridge moment.]

Eskridge captures the fierceness of wanting — whether it is desire for another person, to give sound to something new, to know and be known as yourself — and how it is caught up with fear and hope. Her characters explore (with varying degrees of certainty and risk) giving, giving up, giving in, giving to another, giving to self, and they choose complicated over easy, pretty much every time. It makes for better stories.

I knew before I was halfway through the first story (“Strings”, with the power of its imagined music) I’d read this book more than once. Then there was “And Salome Danced” with its impossibility and thrumming desire, and “City Life” asking questions about right and wrong… all seven stories are worth the investment of your time. They stay with you. (The title story, a novella, is the one I was thinking of when I had my music moment.)

I think good short stories, really good short stories, are inspiring. They plant ideas — sometimes you don’t even know they are doing it when you are reading them — and days or weeks or months later, you find yourself mulling over something that started with a story. I believe this book will be like that. I loved reading it, and parts of those stories are in my head now, and I’m not sure what they’ll do. Highly recommended.