Mike Topp is a disablingly funny writer--a miniaturist of nervous precisions, our supreme abridger of metropolitan startlement and inner fidgetry. He dazes and graces us.

I have never felt at ease in language. I did not grow up among books or among people who read them. I heard words emerge from mouths but didn't get the hang of how people hung the things out as if on lines to get their gripes and recreational distempers yowlingly known.

I've been within an inch of my life.

You get tired of always wondering anew why life has to take the place of youth.

What could be worse than having to be seen resorting to your own life.

Kim Chinquee writes with remarkable heart and grace. Her wise capsulizings of love's devastations and of life's roil and disappointments come at you with a sorrowing precision that comforts even as it haunts.

Then came nights when, lying awake beside my final wife, I would spend too much time putting my finger on what was wrong. I was wearing the finger out. What was wrong was very simple. Sometimes her life and mine fell on the same day.

Dylan Nice's Other Kinds is the most extraordinary short-story-col lection debut I have read in years. It is a book to be memorized.

I prefer the sorts of words that go their own way and are very choosy about where they end up. They don't fall for the first frillily syllabled thing to come along.