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.
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.
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.
