I’ve just finished Amelia Gray‘s AM/PM. The spine lists it as “a book by Amelia Gray”, and that, rather than “stories by”, sounds about right: it’s composed of just over a hundred works of flash fiction, many of which share characters, and is structured in such a way to provide a fair amount of emotional payoff by the end.
Which doesn’t at all capture just how readable this is. There’s a bittersweet absurdity to it, a way in which the familiar is rendered surreal and unpredictable — a quality that it shares with work as diverse as The Dismemberment Plan’s “The Ice of Boston” and Emily Horne and Joey Comeau’s A Softer World. The sentences are neatly structured, as are the stories: there isn’t a wasted word to be found here.
(Obligatory note here that I am not, perhaps, entirely unobjective with respect to publisher featherproof books.)