The temptation these days for those of us with our heads buried online all day is to call any collection of short text pieces ?blog-like?. I?m going to stay on-message here and refer to J. Robert Lennon?s Pieces for the Left Hand as being rather like a Diaryland diary written by someone who is particularly clever, smart, and funny. So maybe not so blog-like after all. (Burn!)
Anyway, Pieces is a collection of 100 or so 1-to-2 page stories, both fiction and non, about, well, nothing in particular, which is why I enjoyed them so much. Many of the stories are surreal, but not in the obvious David Lynch midgets-talking-backwards kind of way. They?re more subtle, a small-town kind of surreality. And for me, the perfect thing to read on the train or plane, literary snacks to have with your pretzels.