A bodybuilder is charged with superhuman energy and an ability to make lightbulbs explode. A grieving father tries to communicate with his dead son via a tape recorder. A high school girl claims to have her uncle's nipple in an envelope. A thirtysomething woman is fired from her dead-end job at Manpower and comes to understand her life through the experience of a German shepherd. Four ornery squirrels, tied together by their tails, struggle to maintain their sanity. Ten stories in all, the highly original PHONE CALLS FROM THE DEAD pulses with meaning. Alive and odd and needy, the characters in Wendy Brenner's stories grapple with the extraordinary and the ordinary, searching for answers from unlikely sources, striving to connect with each other and with something greater than themselves. Amidst a world of technological, natural, and possibly supernatural phenomena, they struggle with the most human of losses and longings. Named one of twenty-five fiction writers to watch by Writer's Digest (along with Allegra Goodman, Jhumpa Lahiri, and William Gay), Brenner has been paving a new path through American fiction ever since her first collection, Large Animals in Everyday Life. Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, described that collection as "chock-full of pitch-perfect dialogue and dead-on descriptions . . . intoxicatingly original." In PHONE CALLS FROM THE DEAD, the stories do just that, and then go a step farther. Whether it moves you to uncontrollable laughter or to tears, you won't soon forget Wendy Brenner's work. Wendy Brenner's first collection of stories, Large Animals in Everyday Life, was the winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award. Her stories have appeared in the Oxford American, Mississippi Review, Five Points, and Story, among others. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and has won the Henfield Transatlantic Review Award. She is contributing writer for the Oxford American and is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. The Anomalist His Mission His mission was simple: to destabilize scienti?c paradigms by assembling a multivolume collection of every scienti?c anomaly ever recorded-an Encyclopedia of Anomalies, the most comprehensive, exhaustively researched reference text of its kind. Okay, so maybe it wasn't simple-but it could be accomplished. It was not an experiment, in which the outcome was uncertain, but a task. He loved tasks. He loved the gut satisfaction of collecting, going from empty to full, knowing you hadn't missed anything. Unlike his colleagues at the corporate labs where he interned as a student, he never complained about working on the cash-cow research projects commissioned to prove what was already known, the endless recording of data in closed white rooms, no credit, no contact, no ground-breaking results. Teachers and girlfriends had always told him he was obsessive, "though not interestingly so," his college girlfriend, a poet, said. "Your imagination is so literal, it's not even an imagination," she told him. "It's like, a dresser or something." "But you knew I was a marine biology major when we started going out," he said. "Scientists have to be logical." "Scientists are supposed to love competition, discovery, not just data, data, data," she said, and then dumped him for his art-major roommate, a natural extrovert who had a high-paying museum curator job waiting for him upon graduation, because, he bragged, "I interview like a motherfucker." She had gotten on the anomalist's nerves, anyway, always announcing everything that was happening as it was happening, the way old people did at the movies-so that he secretly began to think of her as PA Girl. Like when they were lying entwined, she would say, "We're so close right now." After they ate she exclaimed, "We're done!" "We are having so much fun," she'd say, and he'd think, Yeah, I was, until the pa came on . . . She wasn't so unusual, he knew; peop