I thoroughly enjoyed Moffett’s first collection, Permanent Visitors, and was happy to hear word of this second one. Moffett is a master of the quirky, off -beat and often very humorous story. Even in his oddest stories, like “The Big Finish” here, with its talking birds, Moffett still manages to be touchingly poignant and invoke great sympathy in the reader for his characters.

The 9 stories in the collection are:

1. Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events – 34 pp – A story that thoroughly deserved its place in the Best American Short Stories of 2010 collection. A writer has to deal with the enraging fact this his father, in retirement starts to dabble with writing and ends up publishing some very powerful stories in literary journals. The way the story portrays the son’s jealousy and annoyance over this is marvelous. But this turn of events, particularly the stories the father is publishing, forces the son to reexamine memories of his mother’s death and reconsider his assumption that his mother’s passing had little effect on the father.

2. Buzzers – 20 pp – A young man goes to Europe to study architecture just as he learns his ill father has died.

3. In the Pines – 27 pp – A lonely widow lives in a retirement home that looks out a on a Civil War battlefield. Because she can’t find any suitable male companionship, she begins to imagine conversations with a solider from the war.

4. First Marriage – 26 pp – A newly married couple transporting a man’s car to Florida get delayed while their cars get deodorized by mechanics because a snake had crawled into and died.

5. Border to Border- 25 pp – An Estonian immigrant who works at an Epcot Center-like amusement park called Small World swallows the crown of his tooth. Without health insurance to pay for new dental work, his taste of freedom in the new world means having to deal with the gross prospect of fishing the crown out when it comes out the other end of him. A gross premise, but a charming portrait of an innocent surrounded by people not as principled as he.

6. Lugo in Normal Time – 22 pp – An alcoholic tries, not very successfully to connect with his ex-wife and teenaged daughter.

7. English Made Easy – 27 pp – A story that blew me away when I first read it in American Short Fiction. A young mother has to deal with the death of her husband, who passed away when she was pregnant. Her days are filled with dealing with a pushy sister-in-law who is excessive in her efforts to keep her brother’s memory alive and a neighbor with Alzheimer’s who almost provides a model for the young widow on how to move past painful memories. Per usual in a Moffett he mixes all this poignant, heartfelt stuff with quirky situations – here a brother-in-law who got into trouble for having sex with a puppet.

8. The Big Finish – 22 pp – A man who does bird shows on a cruise ship has to deal with an amorous boys and a pair of birds who talk to him, mostly letting him know how much they preferred their previous trainer.

9. One Dog Year – 21 pp – A sick and elderly John D. Rockefeller spends his last days overlooking the beach with his manservant and the doctor he’s paying a hefty sum to keep him alive so he can reach his goal of living to 100. He realizes a life spent saving and planning for the future left little opportunity to savor the moment – but now he wants to begin doing that, as a stunt pilot offers to give him a ride in his plane.

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A collection of nine short stories -- “pedigreed” stories you might say, since eight of them were previously published in literary journals like McSweeney’s, Tin House, and Harvard Review, and two of those were selected for volumes of The Best American Short Stories series.

They're quietly funny, mostly accessible but sometimes confounding, and often melancholy but in a comforting way that says we get through difficult times. I enjoyed the originality in premise or voice in most of the stories, especially the title story about a young writer, his writing mentor, and his father who in retirement "began writing trueish stories about fathers and sons"; and another that opens when an architecture student, on board a plane awaiting takeoff to Italy, receives a text that the terminally ill father he just visited has died ... the tension builds beautifully as he hesitates, deciding whether to go back or go on.

I gave up on one (curiously, the only unpublished) story and skimmed another. But I’ll look for more by Kevin Moffett.

(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.) ( )