Public Works

From the manic, single-sentence fiction ""Public Sentence"" to the carefully structured and plot-twisting ""We Stand Here, Swinging Cats,"" Grimes' stories have an and associative quality - nothing follows predictably from anything, and beginnings never foreshadow ends. While reading, one has the sense that, despite recognizable voices and themes, this imagination seems alien, as though it were divvying up and parceling out the world peculiarly. In ""Glue Trap,"" a one-legged shopkeeper offers expert instruction in the art of one-on-one combat with a rat. In ""Making Love: a Translation,"" the stream of consciousness creates a fiction as simple as Hemingway, as wistful and disassociative as Julio Cortazar. Ultimately, Grimes' stories question the grids and schemes we impose on ""reality"". His is a formal defiance of the tyranny of traditional narrative, expressed with a thematic daring that moves between the contemplation of the ordinary and high art.