There’s a woman with a hole in her life so big she fills it by eating, first food but then much,much more.

There’s a man whose love story with a large woman has its climax when he turns her into a loveseat.

There’s a community infiltrated by a new breed of homeless folk, a higher echelon of hobos who discuss philosophy while they drink your wine and sleep in your beds when you’re away on holiday.

There’s an English teacher whose attempts to instil a love of the language in her war-worn overseas students disintegrates like the government of the country she’s visiting.

There’s a mother paddling in a piratical sea with a schizophrenic son whose conspiracy theories on moustaches make everyone around them avert their eyes.

There’s a daughter connecting the Canadian consciousness with her mother’s old world heritage and her own forgotten history.

There’s the love story—or not—of an immigrant and a highly-skilled interviewer with a hidden agenda.

There’s a sad little girl with a radio in her belly.

There’s the end of the world, a flood, and a giant handmade floating continent of plastic and rubber.

These are the short stories in Radio Belly, a collection by Canadian author Buffy Cram. This is her first—and it’s a good one. Published by Douglas & McIntyre in 2012, Radio Belly got a lot of quick attention from the usual Canadian literary reviewers—Globe & Mail, Quill & Quire, National Post, and so on. When you read the stories of these strange characters, who are often weird in a way that’s hard to pinpoint but are also close enough to reality to be believable, you can see why it got attention. These peculiar people are like the characters out of a Wes Anderson movie—slightly and subtly caricatured. And the situations they find themselves in are bizarre but not science fiction. It’s like taking the weirdest that real life can throw at you, and nudging that up a tiny bit. Radio Belly is an ambitious debut for a young writer.

And it’s not all strange—there are also scenes of crushing reality, twisted only slightly…just to make you think. Cram has worked some morals and metaphors in without being too showy about it. There are touching moments, moments of pathos, scenes of poignant beauty. Butwhat’s exciting about reading these stories is their vitality. There’s something really exuberant about Cram’s writing—the prose pops. And she obviously has no shortage of interesting ideas.

I wouldn’t say everything in this book is amazing. When you finish some of the stories, you say to yourself, “Oh, okay,” and quickly move onto the next. But there are some real gems in this book, stories that do a pretty good job of capturing what it can be like inside your head and putting it on the page. That’s not easy and her success in pulling it off is a testament to her inventiveness and skill as a writer. If this is her debut, it’s going to be fun to see what she takes on next.