"By all means" by Tim Love (Nine Arches Press, 2012)

Short stories from Staple, Under the Radar, etc

• Olga, December '76 - A man gets a call from a troubled ex. He dashes to meet her in London. She hasn't changed. He has. He sleeps with her before he has second thoughts about alternative lifestyles, and creeps away. Years later, he builds his kids a tree-house.
• The Big Climb - A father's on a caravan holiday with his little son. The mother disappeared a few months before. Today they're going on a long walk. Will she return? The father says they'll have to wait and see.
• Late - A pair of men, old mates, search in vain for the grave of an mutual friend as night falls. They're nearly locked in the graveyard. The married narrator is worried that he'll be late home.
• Prague '86 - A man visiting his friend in Prague meets his friend's aunt, who lived through some troubled times
• Doors and windows - London. Mark's male partner walks out on him. He recalls summer holidays in Wales when a boy, his parents breaking up, the people who'd helped him through life. Bill Thompson had introduced him to the gay scene. Mark goes to Bill's old London address. A young man lives there. He says he'll look for Bill's address and meet Mark later. Mark decides instead to get a train for Wales.
• Method of Loci - The narrator on a Moroccan train starts writing. He chats to a woman opposite. They're involved in the same conference. His paper is entitled "Transgendered Infiltration of Fractal Grammars"
• Dreams - The narrator had a mental crises while driving, deciding whether to accept a new job. Now he's going through the contents of his loft, watching old video clips and BBC retrospectives.
• Definitions - A person in transition goes swimming in a hotel pool. It gets tricky
• Fractals - A writer tries to write a story. He goes for a walk, hoping to gather material. Nowadays his story drafts shrink to Flash. Sometimes they expand out again.

Lots of details and self-conscious narrators. Many analogies. It's "Reality Effect" vs "Meta", "Purple prose" vs "sad, grey lives". Often a person journeys in an attempt to make sense of something, hoping there are lessons in the past. In several of the stories ("The Big Climb", "Late", etc) one of the significant characters is absent. All the stories (except "Olga, December '76" which fast-forwards years at the end) have narrational durations of at most a day (often just hours) punctuated by flashbacks.

More details are on litrefsbyallmeans.blogspot.com