Rarely do I not like a book of short stories, but that was the case here.  Despite the blurbs praising his prior two volumes of short stories and despite my positive feelings about one of his novels, this collection was not fun and hard to get through.  I even skipped one story entirely after a few pages of modernist chaos.  I re-read the NYT Book Review review by Michael Greenberg (?), and it echoed many of my complaints though converting them into praise—“Lethem works in an interesting literary space between realism and absurdism, modernism and postmodernism, satire and a particular brand of DeLillo-inspired darkness.”  Enough said for this aging, traditional reader.