Hurry Please I Want to Know

In his second story collection, Griner (Follow Me) overlays tales of family, artistry, and parent-child relationships with elements of the surreal, in order to create, in the words of one character, “an undercurrent of mournfulness.” In “The Caricaturist’s Daughter,” an illustrator uses his godlike powers to manipulate the bodies of his family and others until his antics stoke a rebellion by his daughter. In “Trapped in the Temple of Athena,” a man’s one-night stand with an illicit-bone trader inspires contemplations of death. Some of these entries, such as “Open Season,” which imagines a world where words have corporeal bodies and are hunted by humans, fail to rise beyond the level of extended imaginative riffs. The collection’s best stories are its shortest: flash fiction–length tales—such as “The Only Appearance of Rice,” a vision of privation from the perspective of a child, or “Balloon Rides Ten Dollars,” about a hot-air balloon journey captained by a drunk woman—offer just enough detail to produce strong emotions while remaining cryptically open-ended. A line from “Immanent in the Last Sheaf,” another masterly short piece, could serve as the collection’s mission statement: “It was better not to guess,” the protagonist tell us, “than to guess incorrectly.” (May)