BAR FLIES

Ordinary folks tell ordinary—and sometimes extraordinary—stories in this sparkling anthology of essays culled from live, spoken-word performances.

Debut editors Silverman and Bravo include 60 nonfiction pieces from “Bar Flies,” their live storytelling series, which they’ve hosted in a Phoenix, Arizona, bar since 2015. As in “The Moth” and similarly anecdotal shows, the fare consists of short, first-person essays—each a few pages long in the text—focusing on tidbits of memoir, family histories, character sketches, and shaggy dog anecdotes; the latter is exemplified by Deborah H. Sussman’s piquant portrait of her border collie, Henry, and the Frisbee games that he apparently played with a ghost. Other highlights beguilingly run the gamut of emotion, including Amy L. Young’s truly raucous account of a meth-fueled Christmas, capped by a theft of oyster stuffing (“That fishy, mushy bread was FUCKING MAGICAL”); Amanda Kate Kehrberg’s droll look at a Dragon Con fantasy convention (“When I watch ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ I know I should feel more fear at the dark vision of a fascist state, but I can’t help envy government regulated, monochromatic wardrobes”); and Cindy Dach’s engagingly wry memories of family wisdom (“When I was 11, my grandmother told me that I should not be a virgin on my wedding night because that would be a terrible time to find out that my husband did not know what he was doing”). Also notable are Salvador Lee Bravo’s nerve-wracking account of an odyssey through Ukraine, Stacy Pearson’s self-lacerating retrospective on her public relations work for a businessman facing #MeToo allegations, and James A. Ahlers’ anguished narrative of his wife’s troubled pregnancy. Overall, readers will find that the collection has real literary quality—and the ring of hard-won, homespun truth.

A charming set of tales that’s funny, heartwarming, and haunting, by turns.