Live Cargo: Stories

Fiction. Pauls Toutonghi's first collection of short stories reveals that he is a master not only of form, but of emotional and colorful tales that range in subject-matter from Houdini's 1908 escape from handcuffed submersion in the Seine to the intertwining of a grandfather's story of death in the trenches of World War I with Picasso's discovery of a friend's suicide. "There is at once a wonderful depth and playfulness in Pauls Toutonghi's stories. They are erudite and experimental, always...