NOW IT SEEMS THAT I'M NOT HERE AT ALL

Stories featuring unhappy women whose emotional appetites cannot be satisfied.

Sweets are everywhere in Burns’ new collection of short stories, her third. In the opener, “The Affair,” a woman on an apple-picking trip with her husband tries to inject their love life with a new spark by pretending they are having an affair with each other. At the story’s climax, the woman startles her sensible spouse by asking him to lick her diner breakfast’s whipped cream off her face. In “The Keeper of the Waldeinsamkeit,” a woman having an actual affair humors her lover’s fantasies about taking her to the patisseries of Paris with the understanding that their mundane reality means they will never do more than eat cupcakes in his apartment. In “Cakewalk,” a woman and her wealthy husband move to a new town in which the annual cakewalk—a bit like Shirley Jackson’s lottery—reveals the sinister underbelly of the seemingly idyllic suburb. The stories are so rich with desserts one can practically taste them, though if these stories are baked goods, they’ve got a large dose of cyanide slipped in, too. The women protagonists of these stories are disenchanted by both the men in their lives—who often treat them carelessly and distantly at best, as bodies to be consumed—and the other women around them, who can’t seem to see how feminine trappings—lipstick, dresses, buttercream frosting—become actual traps. Burns, as always, is darkly funny and her sentences burst with linguistic riches: Female rage can be delicious on the page. But the stories are nearly strangled by the vitriol in them, as if Burns cannot help but hit the same emotional note again and again.

The bitter taste running through these tales can overpower the delicate flavors of which Burns is clearly capable.