Pasha Malla, multiple nominee for the Pushcart and Journey Prize, has penned his first collection of short stories, The Withdrawal Method. It’s an intelligent debut full of revenge-driven haircuts, lecherous simians and traumatic Easter weekends, yet it maintains a cheery optimism throughout. Far from being the ramblings of a zany wiseacre, the stories are beautifully understated and meticulously crafted.

They are emotional rather than narrative. This allows for a dignified grace among the characters. They move at their own speed — sometimes faltering, sometimes excelling, but never exaggerating for the sake of melodrama.

There is an ever-present atmosphere of mystery within the stories and rarely does the reader get the full picture of what is going on. What Malla chooses not to say creates an enveloping feeling of intrigue that he uses to his advantage (it doesn’t matter why Niagara Falls dried up — it did and now there are more important issues to deal with).

Some stories in The Withdrawal Method are strong enough to be worth their own full novels, and the constraints of the short story format leave them feeling abridged. I mean, when you follow the exploits of a chess-playing robot for a couple hundred years and through a handful of countries, you become attached to it and don’t want to skip over details or feel cheated by a hurried ending. However, Malla almost never offers a tidy resolution for his protagonists — many of them leave just as lost as they began.

If you have no patience for subtlety you may find yourself scratching your head and wondering what Malla is talking about. Some stories seem to begin 10 pages before they should and don’t end as much as stop. The air of mystery is frustrating, because you feel like you never quite get the inside scoop, and can’t become involved in the story because you don’t know what’s going on. (What the hell happened to Niagara Falls?)

Providing you have the stamina for long expositions and open endings, the stories are quite delightful and leave a lasting impression. It’s unlikely you’ll find yourself on the edge of your seat waiting to find out if all the hip young couples work out their relationship problems, but at least you’ll care if they do. That, and it has a goat-humping ape. That alone is worth the price.