The 6th installment of my January Book Project is something I picked up from the author himself at last September’s Word On The Street. It’s Buying Cigarettes for the Dog, by Stuart Ross and published by Freehand Books. Hmmmm – how to describe this collection of short stories… It’s like an ADHD version of Etgar Keret, only he forgot to take his Ritalin and swallowed a bunch of amphetamines instead. It’s a little bit absurd, a little bit satirical, a little bit silly. A dog is the site of a political flea circus where hundreds of fleas re-enact Latin American revolutions. The Pope comes to visit and steals his host’s girlfriend. A man has to keep his poodle at gunpoint until he can hire a bodyguard to protect him. A clown serves a restraining order against a man who led an audience uprising against an actor with no talent. You get the idea. For all that, the book comes off as mildly serious. It reminds us how most of the serious stuff in our lives is really too stupid to take seriously, and how most of the stupid stuff in our lives is really too serious to ignore.