One of our best, smartest, funniest authors has just published her first collection of short stories at age seventy-five ... The volume mixes tone and content: its easy intimacy and impression of casualness exist in fascinating counterpoint to its philosophical heft, existential probing, and sagacious maturity. These stories can be at once effervescent and weighty, straightforward and unsettling, hilarious and eerie ... Nunez’s capacity to startle, surprise, even shock her readers is deployed to extraordinary effect in many of the stories collected here. We never end up where we began with a Nunez story ... Nunez’s fiction doesn’t shy away from embittering things or from confronting grief head-on, even as it offers its readers humor, warmth, sweetness — comfort in the wake of the truth.
The existence of this book reminds you why small journals matter to the literary ecosystem ... Her writing is threaded with erudite signifiers and high-minded conversation, but there’s nothing pretentious about it. She is one of American fiction’s most crisp and realized voices. Like the food in a good restaurant, her prose is excellent but unfussy ... Among her best work ... A reminder that she’s among the best we have. I’d rather read one of her books than almost anyone else’s. Her headlights are on, even in midday.
It Will Come Back to You should make you want to imbibe every word Nunez has ever written. In a publishing landscape ravaged by the cult of celebrity and algorithmic shallowness, the fact that such a profound, quirky writer still garners so much acclaim, not to mention a sizeable readership, is similarly a source of hope.
These are terrific short stories from a writer who knows how to pull us into them by selectively removing the veils on her characters’ lives, or sometimes by leaving them exactly where they were and getting us to wonder how those lives will unfold after we have turned the page. We learn a lot about her authorial imagination by looking at these many small slices of it in one compact collection, which is an ideal way to get to know her work if you are not already an aficionado.
They are bitesized pieces, most no more than 20 pages long, often with a twisty idea at the heart ... And there are lots of things to like ... There are the smart, snappy exchanges that are a feature of Nunez’s novels ... Nunez is good, too, at encapsulating a character in a few light strokes ... But quite a few of the stories here don’t fully work, despite these satisfying moments ... Bracing stuff, with an unignorable ending, but unlikely to please many of the readers Nunez found with The Friend. Still, that’s no crime — after all, if writers did the same thing all the time, we’d complain about that too.
It’s a rare pleasure to finish reading a short story collection and vividly recall each entry, and one that It Will Come Back to You, Sigrid Nunez’s first collection of short fiction, affords ... Nunez runs the gamut of human emotion in this kaleidoscopic, boundless collection ... An unforgettable short fiction debut. These stories, steeped in realism but measured by hopefulness, are worthy equals to Nunez’s award-winning prose.
Dazzling ... Nunez has a gift for surprise, whether it’s in the turn a sentence or a story takes, the little revelations that detonate as a seemingly matter-of-fact story unwinds or the variety of protagonists and settings in her stories. She also knows how to calibrate despair and surprising joy, leaving the reader giddily off-balance. Each of these stories, even the most ostensibly wispy, reverberates long after it ends.
Wry, incisive ... A captivating collection that resonates with themes of human vulnerability, memory triggers, generational patterns, and facing shame and bitterness.
You know you’re reading a cracking good story when, if you have to put it aside to run an errand, you spend that errand wondering what’s going to happen next ... All of the stories in the brilliant It Will Come Back to You employ Nunez’s genius at turning the anodyne into something unexpected and startling ... The stories in It Will Come Back to You showcase a writer at her best.
Masterful ... Nunez’s sharp wit remains a steady presence across the collection, roaming freely from one heavy subject to the next without ever slipping into sentimentality. It’s a treasure trove.
