A valiant band of lobsters stage a daring escape from a restaurant on Valentine's Day. A miniature ballerina in a glass globe dances with a beauty that transcends time, space, and reality. A mild-mannered man is driven to violent madness by the machinations of an enormous spider who has invaded his home. A hard-nosed, hard-drinking detective tracks a talking femme fatale cat in a hardboiled kitty city. Temporal manifestations of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse struggle with familiarly human existential crises. A pair of hardened criminals fondly reminisce about their childhood friendship, each knowing that one must kill the other. Two doomed astronauts find bittersweet purpose in their final hours.

These are a few of the memorable themes and characters that appear--and sometimes reappear--in Erin Camille Jackson and Aaron A. A. Smith's short story collection, When a Lobster Whistles on Top of a Mountain the Ballerinas Will Dance. In this evocative and eclectic anthology, Jackson and Smith expertly flow between genres including existentialist literature and philosophy, noir, Kafkaesque fairy tales, absurdism, Southern Gothic, poetry, and Japanese mono no aware to create a realistically surreal floating world of oddball humor, nostalgia, and ephemeral yet lingering beauty.