Widowhood and weirdos, online and off, NORMA is so dark it smarts.

It's a terrible freedom to linger unaccounted for.

Norma is waking up and cracking up. Decades of marriage, housekeeping, and family responsibility: buried with her husband Hank. Now, she's free, gorging on an online riot of canceled soap operas, message boards, and grocery store focus groups. Transcribing chatter for fifty cents a minute. It's all of humanity--grim, funny, and desperate--wafting into her world, a world reeking with the funk of old fast food wrappers, cold stale recycled air, and desiccated car upholstery. And one where appropriate boundaries are suddenly slipping too, when a voice from one of her transcripts goes from virtual to IRL and just down the block.

NORMA is a tart, unhinged flail into widowhood, the parasocial, and some of the more careworn corners of the internet.

I know a girl with a large head who tells only sad stories. She tells me that her stories are not sad because there are other people with worse stories and though this is true, it strikes me as the saddest thing she could say. A motley collection of characters populate these short, short stories, shaped by the daily barrage of media aimed at the general populace. Dramatic, and darkly funny, they revolve around Jewish identity. The schlemiel -- a figure in Jewish folklore who is unlucky and inept at the same time -- is not always apparent in the pages, but is evoked as a guiding concept. People cling to would-be wisdoms, memes, and TV tag-lines, while failing to locate their misplaced communities. A particularly apt book for our current world, where chaos and anxiety reign.