His little sister joins the circus. His parents buy a nerdy horse. He's surrounded by hundreds of men dressed up as Ernest Hemingway. He tries to order a monkey through the mail. And now his baby is eating dog food.

Matt Geiger's award-winning stories reveal the sublime in the mundane and the comical in the banal. There is existential dread. There is festivity amid detritus. There are moments of genuine introspection on what it means to be human. And it's all laugh-out-loud funny when told by a humorist who is determined to live an examined life, even if he's not always entirely...