For several years now, Davy Rothbart has been documenting the imagined stories of miscellaneous objects discovered on the streets throughout the pages of his magazine, Found. To help celebrate the success of his magazine, Rothbart enlisted the aid of friends and fans, recounting stories inspired by their found objects or sharing personal memories, such as Seth Rogen’s account of discovering his first piece of pornography on the streets of Vancouver and then hiding it in the hollow of a park tree. Tom Robbins, meanwhile, uses the discovery of a man’s planned wedding proposal to tell a story of Robbins’s own surprise marriage to his second wife.

The stories in Requiem for a Paper Bag are, for the most part, short and humorous. Jenji Kohan, the creator of the show Weeds, and her husband imagine all sorts of tragic and harrowing explanations after discovering a bloody jockstrap in a thrift store bargain bin. Quite a few of the episodes stem from youthful discoveries and either play on the imaginative power of youth, such as Jesse Thorn’s “The Fairy Tree on Julian Avenue,” which bequeathed to him a collection of “ray guns.”

There are also quite a few stories, like Rogen’s, where the intrusion of some kind of unexpected object becomes part of the transition to adulthood, or helps to usher in a change of perspective. Charles Baxter’s short story “The Next Building I Plan To Bomb” features Harry Edmonds, who discovers plans to blow up a public building and becomes increasing frustrated at the fact that no one else who views the paper ever questions whether Harry himself constructed the plans, leading him to engage in a series of high-risk behaviours.

Sometimes, the authors take a more philosophical spin. Damon Wayans talks about the first night he discovered standup comedy, while Jim Carroll’s disturbingly entertaining trip to the spa really pushes the boundaries of what constitutes “lost” and “found.” Del tha Funkee Homosapien finds a young boy’s letter to God on behalf of his sick father and wonders about the boy’s subsequent moral development. Drew Daniels, of electronic music duo Matmos, questions the whole voyeuristic process while reflecting on a note-laden paper bag that inspired the artistic world of Matmos. Daniels writes about the changing meaning and personal relationship that he developed with the bag, over the course of nearly a decade and a half.

What all of these writers make clear is that found objects can represent breaks from our routines if we are open to allowing them into our lives, providing a window either for opportunity or reflection. Paulo Coelho makes this clear in his discussion on the role the arrival of a white feather plays in the timing of his writing projects. Requiem for a Paper Bag and Found are highly entertaining chronicles of the world that continues to happen around us, especially when we’re not watching.