Puff pieces

Less edgy than its speed- and heroin-focused predecessors, this latest offering in Akashic Books' Drug Chronicles series lights up with 17 stories, poems and graphics featuring the drug in its various incarnations. One of the funniest stories in The Marijuana Chronicles (Akashic Books, $24.95) is Maggie Estep's hallucinatory “Zombie Hookers of Hudson,” featuring Zoey and her one-eared pit bull named Alexander Vinokourov, plus some very demanding 1920s-era weed-smoking zombie hookers. On the quieter side, there's silver-haired, soft-spoken Agnes from Joyce Carol Oates' story “High,” whose growing quest for pot leads her toward danger.