Steven Dunn’s award-winning debut novel is a formally innovative, sonically distinctive work of art that offers its readers a rare glimpse into the lives of poor African Americans in West Virginia, where the novel’s narrator grows up.

I was surprised to find that some of the stories in his most recent collection, A Collapse of Horses, really are quite funny, and funny in an unusual way.

The characters struggle against Natalia’s death as a leap into nothingness—the complete physical destruction of a person.

In many ways, the effects in short fictions are not unlike those found in quantum physics: they become significant because of their small scope. The heightened effects are similar to those found in poetry.

Although the stories are packed with people and dialogue, and laughter, there are also moments of affecting silence, of reflection or metaphor.

Made up of individual stories, each one ending in a fire or focused on accounts of those caught up in a wildfire apocalyptic event, this is a creative, provocative, and refreshingly different sort of book.