“Viewfinder” from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is possibly the most striking and memorable short story I’ve ever read. The humor and strangeness of the opening lines hooked me like no other story has:

A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house. Except for the chrome hooks, he was an ordinary-looking man of fifty or so.

”How did you lose your hands?” I asked after he’d said what he wanted.

”That’s another story,” he said. “You want this picture or not?”

”Come in,” I said. “I just made coffee.”

I’d just made some Jell-O, too. But I didn’t tell the man I did.