In King of the Animals, Josh Russell’s characters trade clothes, homes, kisses, insults, sad stories, and identities as they struggle to make sense of a nation changing faster than they can adapt. The stories in this collection move effortlessly through decades and take multiple forms, from perfect one-paragraph micros and sharply-etched flash fictions to longer stories. Part of the fun is learning where the next page will take you.

In the title story, mothers and children seek asylum in IKEA against the backdrop of a country ripped in half. The protagonist is a boy photographed running naked from his home, which is torched after his father “mockingly diagrammed sentences harvested from tweets in order to prove the man who’d been elected was too stupid to be president.” This is the America of today — on fire, literally and figuratively, from political division, gun violence, and inflammatory social media. Yet despite military policing and rumors of global collapse, a commonplace teen romance blooms among the particleboard furniture, and a son grows to understand a father sick not just from cancer but from an alarmingly incompetent government.

Another story, “Two Photographs by Walker Evans,” sends us back in time to Depression-era America. Referencing a photograph of a half-shaved man standing outside a barbershop, Russell invents the story behind the picture as a love affair between a young woman and the photographer Walker Evans. The story then gets delightfully meta. In Russell’s telling, Evans photographs her nude, and she shows the picture to her brother while hiding the affair from her father. A second photograph — the one outside the barbershop — documents the father’s anger over having discovered the nude — and the affair. Of the nude, the brother asks the sister, “Why show it to me?” Her answer is one thing, but the boy’s question is at the heart of any art, whether photography or fiction.

As a fan of fairy tales, I particularly enjoyed “Suburban Folktales,” a suite of nine modern-day fables. Each is a gem polished to perfection. One focuses on the Sun’s daughter, who “happily settled down, kept her head while she grew big as the moon, gave birth on the longest day of the year, of course to a towhead — and here he is now, climbing into the car seat, smiling, holding a simple crayon drawing of his grandfather.” Other heroines of this suite include a queen drowning in a hurricane-like disaster, a princess who makes a shallow yet satisfactory lover out of baking ingredients, and another princess gifted a ghostly twin with whom she competes. It’s testimony to Russell’s skill and confidence as a writer that the folk tales fit seamlessly among the other more realistic stories.

Russell really understands parenthood, and “Our Boys” perfectly encapsulates parents’ contradictory aspirations for their children. The parental couple’s quandaries are familiar: how to prepare kids for the future while holding them back; how to keep up with kids who are innocent one day and all too wise the next; how hurtful it is when they do exactly what we prepared them to do, that is, to grow up. Russell’s facility for writing about parenting is on full display in another of the longer stories, “House,” in which a father fighting to keep his family together makes comically bad choices that are mirrored by his young daughter’s smaller mistake of stealing her friend’s collection of Barbie shoes:

When I walk into her room, Hazel hides something under her pillow. ‘Do you have Zelda’s shoes?’

‘No.’ She’s a bad liar, but she doesn’t seem to be lying — and then I understand.

‘Do you have Zelda’s doll’s shoes?’

She nods. I expect two or three pairs of tiny heels, but what Hazel’s hidden under a pile of stuffed animals in the corner of the room is a purple plastic pill case big as a book.

There isn’t a weak story in the collection. But the stories are not always easy reading. “Report Concerning the Occurrences at B — ,” one of Russell’s war stories, takes the form of police reports about a divisive stranger whose mix of magic and hokum inspires worship and anger. Heavily redacted, the text is intriguing but elusive, like the stranger. “Some Freud” is similarly challenging: A man who lives in a dreamscape of deceit wakes to find his lover revealing in song her own secret life. Yet some of the most demanding stories are the most rewarding, such as “The Great War,” a stunning, kaleidoscopic survey of one man’s battlefields.

Lingering over the individual stories, we get the sense that Russell has left clues encouraging us to drop down deeper for more treasures. You could settle in and enjoy the gorgeous writing, or you can plumb for the synchronicities, following the protagonists zigzagging between stories or recurring themes of illness, dictatorship, and the loss of home. This is a book to be read again and again, for the new meanings to be found on each carefully crafted page.

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