Little Rock’s Kevin Brockmeier has a new short story collection out today. It’s good.

Since our Book’s section gets kind of buried away on the web, I’ll post my review here.

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Kevin Brockmeier’s writing is like a deep, focusing breath of cool air. Invigorating, steadying, full of feeling — his crystalline prose forces readers to linger over phrases, absorbing every ounce of detail and rhythm, before inching along to the next passage. Pantheon will release his strong new collection of short stories, “The View from the Seventh Layer” (hardcover, $21.95), on March 18. Over the course of 13 stories, the Little Rock author further asserts himself as perhaps the country’s leading fabulist, a writer intent on playing with space and time, who’s unafraid to introduce elements of fantasy.

Conveyed in quick blips, the plots in the collection sound almost farcical — one tells of a city affected by momentary, wholesale silences, another follows the travails of a succubus-plagued priest, yet another tracks a troubled girl convinced she’s been abducted by an Entity from space — but Brockmeier always imbues his characters and the situations in which they find themselves with more than enough real emotion to carry the stories.

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