Twisting the art of the fairytale into something entirely her own, Alla Gorbunova’s (Th)ings and (Th)oughts is a spellbinding collection of thematically-linked short prose. A teacher contemplates leaving her husband after learning that he doesn’t have a soul; a functionary realizes that the only way to survive in contemporary Russia is to go insane; cars fall inexplicably from the sky; skeletons turn up in abandoned lots; a hapless everyman named Ivan Petrovich travels through a madcap Boschian afterlife, coming face-to-face with his own shortcomings, but failing, time after time, to finally get it right. Elsewhere, characters contend with puns, predators, and polyamory, often finding that the bleakness of their existence is an ordeal that only love can sweeten—though it also can’t fix anything.