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.
