Some Trick: Thirteen Stories

In the mathematical fable Flatland, the inhabitants of a two-dimensional world can only see three-dimensional visitors as a flat slice of their true being. That's sometimes how I think of Helen DeWitt, visiting our flat world and trying to translate her countless dimensions into a slice of fiction. Many of you know how ecstatically I adore DeWitt's first novel, The Last Samurai, so to say this book, her first collection of stories, can hold its own with that book is saying something. Her subject is often, again, the struggle of a restless intellect to translate itself into an indifferent world, and for all her brilliance, the most impressive thing (aside from how funny she is) is how fully she expresses her knowledge (and the drama of its burden) in fiction. She's a storyteller most of all.