Chroma

In these odd and elegant, often heartbreaking new stories, wives give away husbands, lovers dispatch each other, and grown men steal tiny stray dogs from parking lots of dawn. It's nothing unusual. Frederick Barthelme's characters continue to circle the self-serve gas stations and drive-in groceries of our culture, looking for each other and finding the quiet, stinging moments in which the mundane gives way suddenly miraculously to the profound. Like the rest of us, these people are dodging Pop Secret microwave popcorn, rented videotapes of maximum-blood death rituals, and three-ply,…