The landscape of this novel in stories Joseph Cardinale s first book-length work of fiction is as familiar as childhood yet beguilingly surreal. The question of whether or not the child in the first fiction and the man in the last story are the same person and whether any person is the same from one moment to the next is perhaps the book s main question.

In prose as spare as it is meticulous, The Size of the Universe conjures an elegant labyrinth of time, space, and memory, in which a wavering self, a self on the verge of becoming nothing, seeks a safe haven from the throes of...