Dangerous Laughter is as much a concept book as it is a traditional story collection. Each of these tales by Pulitzer Prize winner Steven Millhauser can be enjoyed alone — as they were in publications such as Harper's , the New Yorker , and McSweeney's . And yet, when read together, a cohesive conversation emerges. It's as if the stories are sitting at a table, in all their variously personified forms, discussing childhood, innovation, and their sense of the past with one another.

The stories range from adolescent adventures to alternate histories, and are divided into four sections: "Opening Cartoon," "Vanishing Acts," "Impossible Architectures," and "Heretical Histories." Despite their varying subjects, they all share a surrealist core — a cartoon cat chases his mouse nemesis as Tom did Jerry ("Cat 'n Mouse"), a community maintains a life-size replica of its town ("The Other Town"), and women's dresses evolve to the size of houses ("A Change in Fashion").

Millhauser is at his best when grounding these fantastical concepts in the emotional terrain of childhood. In "The Room in the Attic," a man recalls the high-school months he spent infatuated with his friend's sister, a girl who lived in total darkness. Looking back, the protagonist questions whether his boyish obsession stemmed more from his uncertainty about adulthood than from any desire to understand the girl's strange existence. This same tone permeates the title story, which is an elegy to a summer when laughter was in vogue and teenagers provoked one another into fits of hilarity.

Whether you read them all together or prefer to take small bites, the 13 voices in Dangerous Laughter are all gripping. Millhauser continues to channel what is so often said to be missing from today's fiction: the natural storyteller.

-Adam Lefton