The citizens of Plainfield, Texas, have had it with the broke-down United States. So they vote to secede, rename themselves America in memory of their former country, and happily set themselves up to receive tourists from their closest neighbor: America. Couldn’t happen? Well, it might, and so it goes in the 13 stories in Matthew Baker’s WHY VISIT AMERICA. The book opens with a seemingly traditional story in which the speculative element is extremely minimal --- the narrator has a job that doesn’t actually exist --- a story that wouldn’t seem much out of place in a collection of literary realism. From there the stories get progressively stranger.