Dedicated to bookstore junkies and solitary wanderers, Rubin’s stories are about characters (and for readers) more comfortable with a dog or cat on their laps and absurd stacks of books on side tables and floors. Though entropy or the inevitability of a hero’s journey coaxes them out into the world so we can hang off Nychterida Cliff with Aesop, measure the sun’s shadow in Alexandria with Eratosthenes and Archimedes, visit the Prado with Borges and his muse or the Louvre with a grounded Rilke Angel, and save the world with Henry, Alice, and two William James. Rubin’s flummoxed characters wed strippers to learn Russian to be then able to read Notes from The Underground in the original, monomaniacally focus for weeks on reading the cannon of Thomas Hardy and then can’t find their way back to return the books to the library, or go shopping for art books in case they should ever own a coffee table. Along the way, they talk to packs of dogs, murders of crows, and giant tortoises, seeking signs that they or any sentient beings can act beyond the design of precedent causes and conditions … the “Fall of the Sparrow to the Milky Way.” And if we have free will, what are we supposed to do next