Cosmogony
by Lucy Ives
An energetic, witty collection of stories where the supernatural meets the anomalies of everyday life—deception, infidelity, lost cats, cute memes, amateur pornography, and more.A woman walks onto a tennis court. A woman has a conversation with a friend's husband in a supermarket. A woman sees a painting at the home of an art collector. A woman goes on a run. A woman takes videos of a cat in a bodega. A woman answers a Craigslist ad to write erotic diaries for money. Cosmogony takes accounts of so-called normal life and mines them for inconsistencies, cruelties, deceptions, and delights. Incorporating a virtuosic range of styles and genres (Wikipedia entry, phone call, math equation, encounters with the supernatural, philosophies of time travel), these stories reveal how the narratives we tell ourselves and believe are inevitably constructed, offering a glimpse of the structures that underlie and apparently determine human existence—and...