GLASS STORIES

Grimes riffs on the magic of glass objects in this debut fiction collection.

Glass can represent many things: clarity, fragility, artificiality, illusion. In these 17 tales, the author forms glass into all manner of ideas to beguile her characters and reflect—darkly—aspects of their off-kilter lives. A woman who lives in a glass tower welcomes in a wandering girl with a penchant for fibbing: She may or may not have eaten her own mother. A bookstore employee meets a customer who pays for things with apples and gives her a strange book made entirely of glass. A pair of brothers, both veterans, visit a museum of glass art, only to have the pieces draw out the long-simmering tensions between them. A woman treats an ailing wolf with glass pills that are meant to purify one’s insides. A girl is forced to care for her grandmother’s glass dog, who eats light instead of food: “There weren’t many lights in grandmother’s house (she said they gave her a headache), but the dog had a special lamp, a very bright one. You knew he was eating if he got hot to the touch and glowed a little.” In these pages, readers will also encounter glass turtles, glass coffins, glass pianos, and even a glass cabbage. In addition to all the glassy imagery, the stories are united by Grimes’ comic strangeness—the premises are always slightly dreamlike, and the dialogue is oblique, with inevitable intrusions of the humorous and the surreal. In “Glass Cabbage,” the eponymous crystalline vegetable found by a hungry woman in the woods is weird enough before it is revealed to contain a severed human toe: “When she turned the glass cabbage, rolling it around to see the toe from different angles, the toe moved, too. It bumped against the glass edges in a way that looked painful. But there was no one to feel any pain from it, was there?” Fans of Kelly Link and Aimee Bender will enjoy these original, abstruse folktales and the elusive magic that animates them.

A wry and memorable collection of sleek fables.