You Do Understand

Fifty brief, knotty thrusts at life's conundrums make up this hip collection. Themes of failure—particularly in love—dominate, as in the compendium of excuses the narrator of "And Since I Couldn't Sleep" makes the morning after she's left the apartment of a man she's finally slept with. In "An Almost Perfect Evening," the buttoned-down narrator wishes his equally well-brought-up date would reveal a drastic fault. A humorous mixup occurs in "Words Matter," when a lonely man in a hotel room calls the number on a card offered by the desk clerk, though he has misunderstood the card's purpose ("So, you're not..." "No, I'm not"). And what to make of a world in which a person can go to bed a bank mogul and wake up a rickshaw driver? Each of these short bursts (most are barely a page long) bubbles with a droll, dry humor handily captured by Soban's dead-on, deadpan translation. (Sept.)