Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day by Ben Loory

The stories in this book reminded me of the works of Arnold Lobel (specifically Owl at Home), if Lobel had written for adults. They share the same daydream quality, the same wandering imaginative struggles and circular, fanciful routines that come from spending a great deal of time alone, or even out of just plain old loneliness. I was also reminded of the humor cartoonist Chris Ware manages to find in quiet despair, the charming, absurd moments from small lives lived unseen and eventually crushed by an indifferent universe. This is a collection of fables, lots and lots of tiny stories and tall tales, featuring (as a very small sampling) a love affair between a cliff-bound house and a gravity-bound ocean, a city-dwelling octopus who receives a visit from his nephews from the sea, a tree who unroots itself to see the world, a duck who falls in love with a rock, a television set that writes an opera about Winston Churchill, and a man who invites a moose to go skydiving with him.

There is much enjoyment to be had here. However, I'd recommend that readers drink this in small sips. This is a heady mix of whimsy and unfulfilled desire, of absurdest humor and bleak, utter hopelessness, of charming and bizarre anthropomorphisms and violent urges, of insanity and magic, of worlds within worlds of inescapable cosmic frustrations.

Read this book!