Magic for Beginners

These stories are winderful - the kind that map you gasp, literally, while you are reading them. They are stories that will stick in your head.
The final story in the collection, Lull, finds a group of friends around a poker table in a basement. They have been drinking. There is a lull in conversation and then they start to talk. About children. Their lives. It turns out one of them has recently separated. His wife's brother has died and somehow the children of one of the friends is involved. They skirt around this.
Then one of them says he has a phone number. If you call it the person will tell you a story, any story you like. So they call and ask for a story about a devil and a cheerleader.
They are in a closet - time is going backwards - and the cheerleader in an effort to save herself from the devil starts to tell her own story.
It is a story about the men in the room. Only a wierd version. The man is back with his wife, only she is talking with aliens. They are helping her build this machine. It can clone her - so there are hundreds of her, only green. The ultimate aim is to bring back her brother, the one that died, to make time go backwards.
The stories twist inside, back and forth.
In another there is a convenience store at the side of a chasm. The store is like the deck of the Enterprise, the Con Tiki - it is a self contained unit. The two workers live in the store. One collects pyjamas. The other is in love with a woman who works at the dog pound. She drives past the store every night as she gives the dog she is about to put to sleep, one last adventure - a journey around the town.
Oh, and did I say the customers that come in the shop are zombies. They live in the chasm.
In another story characters in a tv show watch a tv show. One of the characters inherits a phone box outside Las Vegas. He calls the number and is given a mission. It's about books.
He has to steal them.
This book is one worth stealing.