CARTOONS

A kaleidoscope of microfictions about small things with big feelings.

Opening with a love note to a cockroach and interspersed with black-and-white illustrations, this collection by author and illustrator Schluter is a showy, whimsical cacophony of delights and grotesqueries. In the opener, “30th Birthday Story,” the author is confronted with three versions of himself at different ages, while a decidedly different joke is played on another doppelgänger in “Imaginary Children.” English majors will have fun with the literary humor in “Example of a Plotline” and “Parable of the Very Narrative Structure at Play in this Parable,” as well as the unexpected surprise of “The Radio,” which simply…fades away. There’s almost a fairy-tale quality to characters like The Girl Who Is a Piece of Paper, in “A Story Narrated by the Boy Who Collects Flies on His Face,” and The Widow Who Had Never Been in Love in “The Long-Term Relationship.” Misunderstandings abound, from a heated argument with a dog in “Civil Discourse,” to the unfulfilled potential in “Parable of the Perfect Translator.” There’s also a whole bunch of anthropomorphizing, for readers who dug David Sedaris’ Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk (2010). The narrator must first address the concerns of his appliances in “Handwritten Account of an Afternoon Spent Talking with the Microwave,” before introducing a cast in “While the Two Slugs Take Turns Drinking Shots of Vodka” that includes a drunk, a poet, and a raccoon in a doctor’s coat in a few of its speaking roles. Finally, for Monty Python fans, two stories with parrots—“Everyone Has Dreams They Have To Hide From the State” and “The Long-Term Relationship.” In short, a little bit of everything, from the unexpected intimacy at play in “Walking Along the Avenue of the Suicides, the Cockroach” to the sweetness of “The Clairvoyant Mother.”

A fantastic assortment of tall tales that look for little miracles in the mundane.