The Weather in Fritz Bemelmans Park

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Fiction. Art. Childhood is a vanished civilization filled with mysterious monuments and charming ruins, colored by our unreliable memories. This collection of 18 stories offers a kaleidoscopic view of childhood's forgotten tropes and dizzying leaps of logic, revealing experiences that are hilariously paranoid, discombobulated, claustrophobic, and filled with yearning. A parrot spins an increasingly outrageous tale of his past; a woman caring for her aging mad-scientist father is alarmed by his teenage sidekick; a dying superhero recalls himself and his archnemesis as lonely outcasts; coma victims unknowingly become part of a shadowy weather-control project; suburbanites regress to a prelapsarian state, menaced by their possessions; and a trio of bumbling fools in a near-future dystopia grapple with a giant robot's sudden appearance. The author’s work has the enchanting feel of children's literature, yet is not for children. Her worlds are vividly rendered, evoking a longing to cross into them. In one story, a woman discovers a 'dove-gray mass' pulsing in her garden, which turns out to be a poem that refuses to leave. Another story features a pet macaw narrating the destruction of many birds throughout history. The author's voice is both comic and elegiac, underlined by a deep sadness amid the absurdity.