A father offers his daughter three hundred dollars to catch a live bear.

Pedestrian Gods is a collection of forty-two short stories in which the impossible takes an interest in ordinary people, who meet it with denial, irritation, or the wrong kind of confidence. 

A demon who has perfected every known form of sexual temptation, and quite a few unknown ones, cannot pull a malaria-ravaged pioneer away from his work. A coin that spent centuries refusing to land finally takes a side in one man's bedroom. A brain tumor develops firm opinions about personal boundaries. Elsewhere, happiness starts killing people.

Across the collection, heartbreak, parenthood, sex, technology, illness, and one talking snail take turns making ordinary life harder to explain.
The stories move through satire, absurdist fiction, dark humor, and the uncanny without settling into a single obedient genre. 

Sooner or later a story drops the joke and does something worse: it recognizes you.
The occasional tenderness on offer here is not comfort. More the feeling of being correctly identified by something that has no business knowing you that well. 

For readers of Etgar Keret, Donald Barthelme and Borges.
Roughly 42,000 words.

Forty-two stories, forty-two thousand words, one coincidence too many to trust.