The stories in Paige Cooper’s surprising and unsettling debut collection are boldly inventive, cryptic, eerie, and challenging. Reading these stories is a bit like watching the approach of a distant object as it comes slowly into focus, or staring at an abstract-impressionist painting and experiencing the revelatory moment when a haphazard arrangement of blobs, splotches and squiggles offers up its meaning. After reading these stories, however, one could be excused for suspecting that the author is not particularly concerned with meaning, or focus either, and certainly not with anything so boring as message or theme. What seems to matter most in these pages is the act of writing/reading as risk-taking and discovery. These are stories that openly defy narrative convention and thumb their nose at reader expectation. Each story seems to venture farther out on the limb than the one that precedes it. These are courageous and elusive fictions that challenge us to put aside our misgivings and follow their lead, forget about what we already know and give ourselves over to something unapologetically strange and baffling. Though it’s certainly true that bizarre, disorienting fiction is not exactly revolutionary, rarely do we encounter a writer who renders their off-kilter personal vision with such clarity and poise. Cooper’s astounding verbal fluency and uncanny powers of description are given prominent display on every page. Nothing in the book seems tossed off or slack. Her prose is mature, sophisticated and visually precise, her stories tightly constructed with sentences that have heft and depth. It is no exaggeration to say that Zolitude is one of the more auspicious literary debuts in recent memory, disturbing and memorable in the manner of Kerry Lee Powell’s mind-blowing stories in Willem De Kooning’s Paintbrush and Andrew F. Sullivan’s outrageous novel Waste. Adventurous readers with a hankering for something off-beat will find their craving more than satisfied. ( )