Our Brains and the Brains of Miniature Sharks: Stories [Paperback]

Desperate to find a cure for his depression, a young man forges an odd relationship with a disgraced scientist. The descendant of a refugee tells her family story using symbols instead of names. A lonely boy from a broken family finds solace in a television show hosted by a mysterious man. In these stories, equal parts sad and funny, Pablo Piñero Stillmann’s characters lose themselves as they search for meaningful human connection. These are stories of chaos—internal and external—of chasing and escaping, of intense longing, but most of all, the nine stories in this book are portraits of people wrestling with their deepest flaws.
 

"Pablo Piñero Stillmann is a master at rendering the unreliable narrator. Like a sleight-of-hand artist working the land of the short story, his characters shift and shape right before your very eyes before you understand how he’s done it. You’ll so enjoy getting taken. Step up to the main attraction, take a spin, see this marvelous show. It’s worth it. Trust me."

            —Sherrie Flick, author ofThank Your Lucky StarsandWhiskey, Etc.

"Like the best of Antunes or Cortazar or Keret, these stories are beautifully weird and alive like magical alleyways that twist and turn, threads that ravel and unravel. They feel all at once intimate and familiar and fun and big and surprising and vital."

—Matt Fogarty, author ofMaybe Mermaids & Robots Are Lonely

"In Stillmann’s Mexico City, you’d probably have to keep changing your clocks. It’s a place of complex contingency, of brief and lovely collision. These are new stories, and Stillmann has wonderfully new ways to tell them. But for me the best of the pleasures are probably old school: rich immersion and the thrill of a line of clean sense. He’s such an instinclS¢