<p>Sonya is the greatest competitive eater in the world, but sustaining peak performance comes at a cost to her and to her marriage.&nbsp;</p>

With wildly imagined characters and jarringly unexpected circumstances, these stories exist in a kind of literary twilight zone. Yet they go beyond merely the creepy and strange, the odd and sometimes absurd, at times exhibiting a keen authorial understanding of human nature and a Kakfaesque pathos for the human condition.