(Once in a while, I take a new book with me to lunch and give it a half an hour or so to grab my attention. Lunch Date is my judgment on that speed-dating experience.)

Where'd you go? Zhivago's Café (Bethany made it sound so good!)

What'd you eat? I had a broccoli and potato piroshki ($4.95) and the borscht ($3.99).

How was the food? I know that this is hard to believe, but I thought this piroshki was better than the ones they used to serve at the delightful piroshki place at Broadway and John. The filling had more flavor, and the dough was perfect—not too moist, not too heavy. I was not so crazy about the borscht, however: I like my borscht to be beety. I also missed being alternately chastised and fawned over by older Russian ladies, so I'll keep going back to Piroshki on Madison, too. But I'm so glad to have good piroshki back on Broadway.

What does your date say about itself? It's an anthology. "Interstitial fiction. It's all about breaking rules, ignoring boundaries, cross-pollinating the fields of literature. It's about working between, across, at, and through the edges and borders of literary genres. It falls between the cracks of other movements, terms, and definitions. These are stories to surprise us—stories showing us that literature holds possibilities we'd never imagined..."

Is there a representative quote? Well, since it's an anthology, no. But here's the opening paragraph to "Remembrance Is Something Like a House" by Will Ludwigsen: "Every day for three decades, the abandoned house strains against its galling anchors, hoping to pull free. It has waited thirty years for its pipes and pilings to finally decay so it can leave for Florida to find the Macek family."

Will you two end up in bed together? Yes. Thus far, it's a really fun, intelligent anthology. But I don't necessarily understand the difference between Interstitial Fiction and science fiction. I understand that these are smart stories about the fantastic that aren't, say, a series of tremendously thick fantasy books based on a Dungeons and Dragons campaign the author ran twenty years ago, but the movement seems ill-defined. Isn't it enough to say that this is one of the smartest, most forward-thinking collections of sci-fi stories to be published this year and leave it at that?