Brain Frieze

Discover diverse worlds of imagination and surprise in these twenty new short stories from the author of "The Rules" and "Cave Paintings." Allen Cobb's best recent short fiction explores the busy characters of New York City, the mysteries of life and death, voodoo in New Orleans, an aging motorcycle and its boomer owner, an extraordinary Doberman, mysterious sleep disturbances, and a short but sympathetic interview with a zombie. Cobb's writing style is compelling and literate, and he manages to make the trivial or absurd unexpectedly fascinating, while handling complex or abstract ideas (life, death, religion, memory) with ease and clarity. The collection is wonderfully varied, from extremely short (especially the 11 tiny stories in "Writing in Restaurants") to the grand entanglements of "16 Degrees of Correlation." Every story takes the reader someplace new and surprising, yet they all share an underlying insight into the mysterious and indescribable realms of the mind.