This debut collection is subtitled "Love Stories". But Rajesh Parameswaran's intriguingly off-kilter world is far from slushily romantic. The meaning of love for Parameswaran, an Indian-born American, is inventively twisted and often found in death: a Bengal tiger's affection for its keeper can't defeat its primal urges; a fake doctor is visited by his cancer-riddled wife; a frustrated housewife goes to a Thanksgiving party knowing that her stubborn husband is dead on the living-room floor.

The writing is dryly comic and often absurd  in the way of much tricksy short storytelling from America  which is this collection's strength and failing. The title story features a garbled and slightly annoying narrator straight out of Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated  "in her eyelook it appeared she already knew my thinkings"  and the footnotes in "Elephants in Captivity (Part One)" are reminiscent of Dave Eggers. Which is not to say this book won't delight and unsettle, but Parameswaran can sound a bit too much like his peers.