True Tales of American Life

This is a collection of hundreds of short short stories by ordinary people, sent in to writer Paul Auster when he hosted a radio show. Only some stories are, as Auster explains, works of literature; but they all have a distinctive, sober clarity. As a panorama of everyday American life, it's truly beautiful. Strangely frequent are stories about weird coincidences: items lost, then found again years later in flea markets thousands of miles away; people meeting each other again and again by chance. Since lots of people apparently experienced this kind of stuff, it seems to make it almost normal.