Trampoline Edited by Kelly Link Small Beer Press 336 pp., $17 Buy this book more books most popular most commented Personal Days by Elizabeth Hand The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York by Tom Robbins Welcome to New York Comic Con by Carol Cooper A Voice Poetry Roundup by Alan Gilbert Etgar Keret's Short-Story Overload by Michelle Orange Girls Love Gay Male Porn Pucker Up by Tristan Taormino My Boyfriend's Kink Is Getting Fat. What Do I Do? Savage Love by Dan Savage Sex and the City Spoilers: A Sneak Preview of What Really Happens to Carrie and the Girls by Lynn Yaeger Our Favorite Writers Pick Their Favorite Obscure Books Summer Guide by ALEXANDER NAZARYAN The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo by Maria Luisa Tucker NYPD Inaction Over a Missing Black Woman Found Dead Sparks a Historic Racial-Bias Lawsuit (9) Sean Gardiner Devo-Inspired Art in East Williamsburg (8) Maro The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo (5) Maria Luisa Tucker David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal' (4) David Mamet Runnin' Scared: Deep South of Houston: Is a Soul-Food Restaurant Too Black for Soho? (4) Runnin' Scared: Chloe A. Hilliard

In fact, little seems to connect the 20-odd stories compiled by Kelly Link (Stranger Things Happen), except freewheeling imagination and a flair for fantasy. Uncanny parallels emerge. Samantha Hunt's "Igor and Igor and Igor and Igor" echoes a sultan's 300 wives in another Hunt contribution, "For Love"—which in turn recalls the 18 Tinas in a story by the Voice's Ed Park (its title exceeds our space constraints). Death is everywhere, from Dave Shaw's grimly funny "King of Spain" and Christopher Barzak's morbid teens ("Dead Boy Found") to Glen Hirshberg's bittersweet "Shipwreck Beach." The Devil is a filthy hitchhiker in Richard Butner's "Dead City Stomp"; Olympian deities mess things up in Carol Emshwiller's "Gods and Three Wishes"; and Vandana Singh's radiant protagonist is a planet unto herself. I'm tempted to say Trampoline had me jumping for joy, but Shared Brilliance would dismiss such glibness as undue influence.