A fascinating short story collection offering glimpses into the lives of those usually unobserved.
Halpern offers a soulful collection of short stories, translated from the Yiddish.
The narrator of the story “Blessed Hands” uses her hands as a masseuse, bringing healing to those who need it, but also as a means of making money (“God wanted these same hands to draw their livelihood from touching the human body”). Her mother had to sell her breast milk, leaving none for her children. This story showcases the themes that will propel the stories that follow: healing, spirituality, family, and persevering through poverty. A butcher does not want his son to take on the family business, fearing he’ll be trapped in an identity framed by poverty and hard labor (“Hello, Butch”). In “The Last Breakfast,” a mother sends her son away to grow, change, and learn to be a man, but he meets a grisly fate. In both stories, a parent believes they must send their child away to have a better future, an idea they ultimately realize was wrong in one way or another. A girl who can’t walk without braces and crutches enjoys winter as a time when she can throw snowballs at other kids and finally play with them (“Snowballs”). A woman who has been trapped in a tomb of loneliness finds community and warmth at a leftist political meeting in “Comrade Bashe.” These two stories effectively convey the yearning of the characters for human connection. In other slice-of-life narratives, a shoemaker spends his days laboring away for minimal reward to keep his family fed and happy and is told a story by a religious scholar about the power of hard work (“Munye the Shoemaker and Baruch Spinoza”), and young women wait for news of their husbands away at war while they work and exchange letters to keep their spirits up (“Faces”). With these stories of ordinary people, Halpern demonstrates a sincere understanding of her characters. The pieces collected here were translated from Yiddish by Taub, who contributes a well-thought-out and researched afterword illuminating Halpern’s life and literary artistry, giving readers a fuller experience of her work.
A fascinating short story collection offering glimpses into the lives of those usually unobserved.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-1642510492
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Frayed Edge Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
All hits and no skips is a tall order, but this strong, solid compilation is well worth a short story lover’s time.
Pitlor ushers in her final installment as series editor of this long-running staple showcasing the year in short fiction.
Of all the kids at the literary lunch table, the anthology might have it the hardest. Wearing plaid with stripes, unpacking the random items in its lunch box—it’s hard for a cohesive personality to shine through, unlike those cool-kid single-author collections. But if readers are prepared for eclecticism—and since Best American Short Stories was established in 1915, we must be—these 20 stories have something for everyone. Guest edited by Groff, a seven-time Best American author, the collection includes some nods to short story royalty: Jhumpa Lahiri, Lori Ostlund, the late Laurie Colwin, and Jim Shepard are all represented. But as both Pitlor and Groff discuss in their introductions, Groff sent back Pitlor’s initial batch of stories asking for something “rawer, meaner, spikier”—stories with their own “weird logic.” (Groff’s description of this aesthetic preference lands better than her diatribe against the first-person point of view, which precedes 12 of 20 stories in first-person.) In finding weird, spiky stories, Groff leans hard—and often thrillingly—on early-career writers. There is Katherine Damm’s sparkling and funny “The Happiest Day of Your Life,” featuring a young husband freewheeling into drunkenness at a wedding reception for his wife’s ex-boyfriend. In Suzanne Wang’s inventive “Mall of America,” AI narrates a tale of corporate (and all-too-human) woe when an elderly man spends time after hours in the mall’s arcade. Madeline Ffitch’s “Seeing Through Maps” recounts the tense relationship between two neighbors with a complicated history. In Steven Duong’s “Dorchester,” a young writer has a poem go viral after an anti-Asian hate crime.
All hits and no skips is a tall order, but this strong, solid compilation is well worth a short story lover’s time.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9780063275959
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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