... disarmingly lovely ... Nugent plunges us directly into the alternately repellent and lonely ecosystem of Delta Zeta Chi with 'God,' a riveting and often hilarious crash course on coed life ... Fraternities may be collegiate America’s biggest shame, but Fraternity is a revelation.

Idealized through...received wisdom and rendered into narratively compelling characters, the brothers of Delta Zeta Chi are not the raving drunks and violent abusers found when opening yet another viral article about some fraternity’s repugnant indiscretions, but somewhat—to use a controversial word—likable. They’re playfully homosocial ... while Fraternity is a charming collection and Nugent a sharp writer, the book is limited somewhat by its setting. The fraternal milieu would be much different had Nugent centered his research at a southern party nexus like the University of Georgia, or an upper crust terrarium like Harvard ... the one story in the collection that addresses hazing, is driven by the brothers’ belief that they can’t be as vicious to pledges as they might want because that type of treatment will go viral—nice of them, even as hazing deaths continue to happen every year. That’s perhaps a failure of imagination, though Nugent is free to write about what he wants. But it’s a convenient way of sidestepping the real darkness of Greek life, considering what a vicious ideological battlefield the contemporary fraternity is ... it’s the barbarians we’ve really got to watch out for, Nugent seems to suggest, the ones whose maintenance of inherently racist and sexist structures is finally coming up for debate and potential abolition. They’re nowhere to be found in Fraternity, but in the real world they’re everywhere, and you’d do well to take them seriously.

Nugent’s stories are paradoxical...alternately rough and sentimental, they boomerang between frat bro clichés...and moments of lyrical, existential reflection. The brutality of frat culture, Nugent suggests, is a veneer that hardly masks its devotees’ miseries and insecurities ... Nugent’s frat stars are seemingly well-meaning oddballs: more likable than the blustering, macho frat type ... One gets the sense that Nugent wants to resist the Animal House model, but the supposedly 'unproblematic' bro is a type, too ... Nugent tries hard to work through current debates in his fictional scenarios. The results can be illuminating and complex, but some of Fraternity’s stories end up reading as pat social commentary ... The most compelling stories in Fraternity are those that tend satirical, riffing on the mock-militarism that defines fraternity rituals and provides a pretext for male bonding ... Nugent...doesn’t seem to think that the frat bro can change. I do, though, which is why Fraternity fell flat for me in places. It provides—but never goes beyond—a kind of canned criticism. Still, there’s much to admire about Nugent’s style ... Nugent’s stories seem to suffer from the same problem these men did. Like a one-armed hug or a fist bump, they express some emotion, but leave much unsaid ... its meditations on male adolescence—with all its grim paradoxes, its fears and confusions—also transcend the frat.

Fraternity’s eight stories look at Delta Zeta Chi from eight different angles, but the essentials remain the same throughout: the bro-life nicknames like Borat or Oprah or Nutella or Dracula, the deployment of the starched minimalism that has become a staple of contemporary Yaddo/MacDowell fiction, the carefully code-worded misogyny, and, unfortunately, the serial mistaking of poor, jumbled prose for cool-cat idiosyncrasy ... Nugent’s book is only one workshopped story north of 100 pages, and yet it absolutely brims with the anomie and nihilism that gives so much modern fiction the affect of a muttering Goth teenager. His young characters do crappy things to each other for crappy reasons that are only ever transactionally assessed by either the characters or the author. It’s a gray landscape and an inherently uninteresting one, since it’s exclusively inhabited by vacuous, self-obsessed idiots. And since if the characters were to grow or change or improve in any way that would imply that the author is a simp, a cuck, an uncritical tool of cultural propaganda, the characters never grow or change or improve.

Each story is told by a different member of the college town, and their voices are equally fascinating. In fact, one of the pieces seemed so fantastical that it read like an extensive, psychedelic, drug-induced hallucination ... a creative and fun collection ... Nugent could have written in this offhand manner to highlight how fraternities view sexual assault. That would have been a very meta interpretation, as both the details of the incident and the subsequent reaction of the brothers are jarring. If this was his intention, I wish he could have made it more clear for readers ... While Fraternity is not as cutting as I would have liked it to be Nugent has penned a solid narrative that will appeal to those who are interested in fraternity life.

While the stories are light on plot, each vignette is highly discussable and written with a deft hand. This slim volume, which includes stories previously published in Tin House, Paris Review, and elsewhere, will appeal to readers of best-of-the-year short story anthologies and fans of Charles Baxter.

Nugent won the 2019 Terry Southern Award, Paris Review's annual prize for humor, and this collection of eight interconnected stories makes it easy to see why ... The comedy in Fraternity, as befits its subject, is dark, uncomfortable, even disturbing ... Nugent understands that satire is a means not only of exposing or ridiculing its subject, but of making them, using the rules of their own skewed logic, understandable, even sympathetic ... Nugent writes memorable women here, too ... This is a book about the awkward, awful passage between adolescence and adulthood and about the way these unwary, ill-prepared boys negotiate it, or try not to ... Nugent manages—the mark of the master satirist—to be simultaneously compassionate and ruthless. Splendid.

... [a] winning collection ... While Nugent shows consistent talent for capturing the voices and shallow ambition of college students, he stumbles when he leaves the campus—the collection’s weakest story, 'Fan Fiction,' dawdles ... Despite this aberration, the rest of the collection pulses with energy, and Nugent commendably weaves humor and drama to shine an unflinching light on the young adults convening behind fraternity walls. One can almost smell the stale beer on the page.