Blood and soap

"In one tale, a Vietnamese boy's self-guided, haphazard study of English gives way to a meditation on the university of language. "Everything seems chaotic at first, but nothing is chaotic. One can read anything: ants crawling on the ground; pimples one a face; trees in a forest." In another story, a man opens a newspaper and sees the photograph of a man he may have murdered, which he impulsively clips, only to feel that in doing so he unwittingly has sealed his crime: "As soon as I finished, I realized what I had done: by cutting my father's likeness out of the newspaper, I had removed him from the world." The collection crescendos in displays of raw creative power, as in "Eight plots," a rapid-fire of three- and four-sentence summaries, and the brilliant, impressionistic "!"."--Jacket.