The Mechanical Copula

''The first thing you notice is nothing. It takes your eyes a little while to get used to this, after ten seconds you can't remember looking at anything else,'' writes Maria Fusco, founding editor of The Happy Hypocrite, in ''How You Lost the Stars,'' part of her first collection of short stories. Stripping bare the accord of culture and commodity, this sequence of stories tracks the slimy path of social mobility with serious playfulness and an eye for the absurd. Tales of Donald Sutherland f---ing a doll, two men eating a clown and how the obsessive searching through garbage cans can transform trash into meaning, this is a book about the porous relationship between the extra mundane and the average. Maria Fusco is Director of Art Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London.