"This one, I think, was probably my favorite collection of short stories in recent memory. ... Tim Horvath writes these stories that are firmly grounded in realism. They're set in a world that we know we're familiar with — it's our world. But then ... he moves into off-kilter. ... I don't call it magical realism — I call it elastic realism. He stretches that definition of realism into places that we might not think it would go. So there are two stories in here that I particularly, absolutely loved. ...

"One is called 'The Discipline of Shadows.' The Department of Umbrology studies shadows from all different points of views. ... This department that Tim Horvath describes is very similar to all the academic departments with its in-fighting. ... The joy of this short story is the sense of this terrific college department of umbrology and how he compares it to the departments of umbrology in various other academic institutions. ... And you end up believing there must be a department of umbrology somewhere. It sounds too good not to exist.

" 'The Gendarmes' ... is about a young man that hears noise on the roof of his apartment, and he goes up there and he finds a group of young kids and asks them what they're doing, and they say, well, they're conducting an experiment to try to teach animals to grasp the concept of extinction. And then he says — and this is a priceless sentence — 'We're tired of having to bail out endangered species. It's high-time they learned individual responsibility.' ... Now how could you not just embrace a book and a writer who can come up with a sentence like that?"