Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

Amazon Best Books of the Month, December 2012: Shortlisted for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize, Gartner’s wide-ranging and unrestrained collection--the short story “at its savage best,” as the Giller jury reported--manages a neat trick: It makes the ordinary seem absurd and the extraordinary seem everyday normal. People and events are turned upside down and inside out, whether it’s the movie industry, art, terrorism, or manhood. If there’s a theme running through these 10 witty, graceful, funny, and sometimes surreal stories, it’s a big fat poke at convention. Like an avant garde post-bebop jazz musician, Gartner seems to relish the unconventional, and her style of storytelling veers from ridiculous to eloquent to heartbreaking and back. --Neal Thompson