WOW. I was a big fan of Ware's earlier book Jimmy Corrigan, but this latest one seems like a leap beyond. It plays a lot more notes than Corrigan's meditation on lonely behaviors, and the playfulness is put to a lot better use. The term "book" is a little loose in this case, since Stories comes as a giant box loaded with everything from small pamphlets to a giant board that folds out as if you were going to play a board game.

These are weird and bad comparisons to use, but the whole thing feels like my favorite part of Infinite Jest: the middle-third where you get 20-30 page jags of some of the best writing you've ever seen, going on for hundreds of pages, seemingly (and pleasurably) without end. Of course, IJ has to come to an ending of sorts, but because Stories is in a dozen different pieces in no particular order, there's this very real feeling that it truly is endless, that you could loop back around to read them in a different order and forever stay in that zone.

The other comparison I would make is to Edward P. Jones' The Known World, which has these wild leaps in time, even in the middle of a sentence. You get the feeling that Jones has imagined his character's entire lives into the future, and that's a similar impression to what Ware brings. Pieces are set as early as the '40s and as late as the modern day, covering different spans of memory and time. One memorable piece—and probably the best to orient yourself by—covers 24 hours and is patterned after the Little Golden Books of my childhood, with the gold spine and hard cover.

Pro-tip: I read from smallest to largest, and left the giant-but-thin (as opposed to giant-but-many-pages) newspaper thing for last. It was a good accidental decision and a great closer for a line of dialogue that's borderline fourth-wall at the end. :)