In Human Oddities, by newcomer Noria Jablonski, we meet Siamese twins, newly separated, drag queens, and seedy hospital orderlies. A corpse washed up on the beach, cancer diagnoses, and tummy tuck operations all intrude abruptly into characters' lives; sadness is interrupted by hilarity. Jablonski's characters cope with the drama of the body and what it means, what it feels like, to be marked as different.

If Ludwig Wittgenstein's belief that "the human body is the best picture of the human soul" is right, what does that say about the diseased body, the less-than-perfect body?...