Wearing Dad's Head: Stories

“I can never remember my dreams, so Mr. Yourgrau’s stories are a pretty good substitute.” —David Byrne

Barry Yourgrau’s imagination makes critics reach: Fellini? Kafka? Freud in a funny hat? Yourgrau is a fantasist like no other. His stories run brief and hallucinatorily vivid in style, heart-jarring and intimate in emotion. As Susan Cheever puts it: “Odd, true, and thoroughly hilarious.”

Here is Barry Yourgrau’s celebrated second book, which focuses his transfiguring surreal imagination on o...