Men and Cartoons By Jonathan Lethem Doubleday, 160 pp., $19.95 Buy this book more books most popular most commented Personal Days by Elizabeth Hand The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York by Tom Robbins Welcome to New York Comic Con by Carol Cooper A Voice Poetry Roundup by Alan Gilbert Etgar Keret's Short-Story Overload by Michelle Orange Girls Love Gay Male Porn Pucker Up by Tristan Taormino My Boyfriend's Kink Is Getting Fat. What Do I Do? Savage Love by Dan Savage Sex and the City Spoilers: A Sneak Preview of What Really Happens to Carrie and the Girls by Lynn Yaeger The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo by Maria Luisa Tucker Our Favorite Writers Pick Their Favorite Obscure Books Summer Guide by ALEXANDER NAZARYAN NYPD Inaction Over a Missing Black Woman Found Dead Sparks a Historic Racial-Bias Lawsuit (9) Sean Gardiner Devo-Inspired Art in East Williamsburg (8) Maro The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo (5) Maria Luisa Tucker David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal' (4) David Mamet Runnin' Scared: Deep South of Houston: Is a Soul-Food Restaurant Too Black for Soho? (4) Runnin' Scared: Chloe A. Hilliard

"The Spray" finds a burglarized couple unable to name all of their stolen things. They allow the cops to treat their home with a liquid that reveals salmon-colored specters of what was taken: the television, his cuff links, her vibrator "glowing like a fuel rod." When the spray is accidentally left behind, she gives him a playful shot of the stuff, revealing the translucent effigy of an ex-girlfriend draped across his front. Here, the book's sense of loss comes to the fore. The characters of Men and Cartoons need their stories to be told so they can be sure that what they thought happened happened, that who they thought they were, they are.