THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW A.M.

Dive into this lavishly imaginative story collection and you won’t want to climb out. Homes brings yearning suburbanites to life with high drama and killer comic dialogue. ”Georgica” follows a woman who inseminates herself with condoms collected from the beach. In ”The Weather Outside Is Sunny and Bright,” a shape-shifter uses her ability to ”read the inanimate” to explain building collapses (shades of Sept. 11), sometimes by transforming into animals. And ”The Former First Lady and the Football Hero” imagines the Reagan household turned upside down by Alzheimer’s, a premise that could have been played for laughs but goes disturbingly deep. Twelve years after the release of The Safety of Objects, Homes’ return to short fiction is a gift.