I’ve said it before: Ben Loory’s stories aren’t like anybody else’s (JR, you probably wouldn’t even consider them stories). They totally have their own logic, their own sensibility. Sometimes they are perfect little fables, but often when I walk away from them, I have no idea what they were about. But they stick with me, like great episodes of “The Outer Limits,” or asparagus—I’m not sure why they have the effect they do, but it’s strong. And like cryptic things crazy people shout in your face, you end up trying to unravel their significance for a good while after the fact. And they’re downright addictive,too. It’s hard to put this book down.

Loory stories are not strung randomly together, though at first this may seem like the case. The collection has an arc, a palpable progression, with the exception of “The TV” which was tacked on at the end, obviously because of its appearance in the New Yorker. It doesn’t detract from the whole, however. I just think of it as a bonus track.

Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day is on sale tomorrow, so keep your eyes peeled. And lastly, I gotta’ say, it’s really refreshing to see a big six publisher (Penguin) giving a wildly unique story collection like this such a nice push.I can’t help but feel like this bodes well for other writers of wildly unique stories, who have in recent decades fallen through the corporate publishing cracks.