Invite

To speak or not to speak is the recurring theme in Pourciau's 10 short stories. In “The Neighbor,” a character “rattles around in his house with his story trapped inside him,” while in “Among the Missing,” the narrator is such an unstoppable fount of conversation that a couple hires him to talk to them. A slight discourtesy, begun when the narrator and his wife in “Snub” avoid a couple whose company they do not enjoy, becomes a round of increasingly obsessive apologies, accusations, explanations and excuses. In the title story, a simple “What are you doing here?” haunts the narrator, who can never decide if the question was a challenge or an innocent query. Taken at once, Pourciau's stories are obsessive, repetitive and tend to blur, but individually, the better entries resonate with the questions they provoke about life, reality, memory and truth. (Oct.)