Amelia Gray is one of my favorite writers publishing online, and I’ve been looking forward to her book AM/PM from Featherproof Books. It’s a collection of very short stories or sketches or observations or jokes or all the above, really, that at times reminded me of a play I was in once called Comings and Goings and at other times of the recurring Muppet Show segment in which ballroom dancers tell jokes (these are both good things).

The stories capture the quirks of people and their relationships, sometimes realistically and at other times in more absurd, surreal ways. Sometimes that focus became too tight, though, as if all the stories were taking place in the velvet-lined box where two of the recurring characters appear in Beckettish conversation about the very firm boundaries of their fictional world. At times I wanted the stories to acknowledge a world beyond themselves, I guess, or to acknowledge more fully the artificial walls of their lives or even of their genre (as the scenes in the box do so well). They’re funny and sad and compelling just as they are, but one after another they became a bit claustrophobic. That I think so probably says more about me as a reader than it does about anything else; it may even be unfair to a book in which a character’s admission of “the hatred she felt for the people and things over which she had no control” (123) echoes through the collection.

No surprise, then, that the stories I was most engaged by were those in which the world shows through the walls — often in the form of trees, or animals, or weather — and those things that can’t be controlled intrude on the tidy, tight world of fiction. In fact, there’s a sequence of these beginning about two-thirds through the book which made that alternation between narrower and wider scope all the more powerful and graceful and skillful. It complicated the book just when I wanted it to become complicated, and made me rethink what I’d already read even as I read onward — what more can a reader ask for than that?