Believable Buff and Other Stories

In sixteen stories, people build rules to stay alive, and the rules hold right up to the second they give.

The stories move from a Pennsylvania sidewalk to a Belgrade tattoo chair, from a hotel that keeps a calendar for its orchids to an apartment in Brno where a man who has never touched a chess piece replays one game from 1927 every day, from Strasbourg in 1518 to a mountain in West Virginia that nobody will explain to the new man.

Believable Buff and Other Stories is a new collection from Cristian Mihai, author of Dream City and Other Stories and The Writer. It is a book about what people owe and what they will do instead of paying. If you read Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enríquez, Lauren Groff, or the early Chuck Palahniuk, you already know the temperature of this book.