Heads or tails

*Starred Review* Most of these stories are concerned with alternatives overlapping realities, different explanations of a single phenomenon, evolving contradictions. A fancily dressed gent bids Welcome to My Kingdom, waving at all the space around him; on each successive page, as he rants about the marvels in that space, the border framing him thickens until he's compressed into an hourglass abstraction of himself. The protagonist of Wishy Washy revels in his decisiveness, but after driving into a deer as implacable as he is, he becomes utterly diffident, only to meet with another catastrophe. The Thing about Madeleine is a doppelganger tale in which the hard-drinking heroine tries to confront her double and succeeds, only to be driven out of town and into a new life. In The Carnival, the collection's longest, most dramatic entry, Madeleine's male counterpart flees town like her but returns, though with a bit of where he's been, fortunately for him. Two more long stories and a clutch of shorter ones and single-pagers fill out the volume. As a graphic artist, Carre carries forward the design tradition that stems from the gossamer surrealism of Cocteau; as a verbal artist, she may be the most successful prose poet going. Yet her work most piquantly recalls the great avant-garde narrative films, from Menilmontant (1926) to The Saddest Music in the World (2003). Her Wanda Gag-meets-Gene Deitch drawing style and new-weirdness literary bent make her work acutely interesting to both read and scrutinize.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2010 Booklist

Carre, author of The Lagoon, has a new collection out, a scrapbook of strange and beautiful stories. Dark and surreal moments fill most of these pages. A soap saleswoman is slowly forced out of her routine and her life by a mysterious doppelganger. An opinionated professional flower arrangement judge survives a car accident only to lose his critical compass. And an entire city awakens to a sound that everyone interprets differently. Carre's visual exploration and experimentation also work wonders for her stories, as she switches between styles and colors with each story. Her willingness to try anything is evident in one short comic that echoes the structure of Cloud Atlas's stories within stories within stories, and showcases Carre's ability to tell intricate and meaningful narratives in the course of a just a few pages. Her tales are also close studies of people brushing up and pushing past one another, struggling to connect. In the course of many of these, Carre investigates how we are lonely and the many futile ways we attempt to connect and hold on. Some are stronger than others, but each one is a weird, lovely gift. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.