HECTIC ETHICS

Eight satirical stories chosen from three collections previously published by an award-winning Mexican writer. Hinojosa is an inventive comic stylist with a bit of T. Coraghessan Boyle in him, and he possesses some of Boyle’s skill at mixing farcical with serious material (e.g., “This Time the War Was Getting Serious,” about a weirdly escalating feud between two apartment-dwelling families). His more formal experiments (such as “An Example of Beauty” and “The Broken-Down Life of a Dead Man”) are pedestrian, but at his best—as in the beautiful “People Are strange,” which charts a grandfather and grandson’s progress through illness to enlightenment—he exhibits a range of imaginative effects unexcelled by any of Latin America’s contemporary writers.