Entertaining and evocative slice-of-life stories.
Worton presents a collection of short essays featuring random, amusing, and often tender memories and observations of family and everyday life.
The author was born in 1949 and raised in Massapequa Park, New York, a village on Long Island with a predominantly Jewish and Italian American population. Many essays here offer reflections on a childhood and adolescence defined by the postwar culture of the late 1950s. One vignette describes Sundays at her grandparents’ house in Brooklyn, where Grandma’s legendary spaghetti and meatballs ruled the day at a gathering of aunts, uncles, and cousins; another piece focuses on preparations for an aunt’s wedding. “We were big singers, guitarists, and accordion players in my Italian American family,” she writes of weekly get-togethers, with popular music playing in the background of her recollections. With amusement, she reveals that she fell madly in love with John Lennon as a teenager. At another point, Worton also shares how, at age 7, she inadvertently cut off a sizable lock of her best friend’s hair while they played beauty parlor in 1956. There are also vignettes about her emerging political activism in the ’60s as she moved into adulthood. Taken all together, the essays create a vivid pastiche of mid-to-late-20th century Americana. Worton effectively tells her stories in a breezy style, laced with both humor and poignancy. There’s a steady confidence in her prose as she meticulously observes and comments on her own actions, the world around her, and occasional esoteric thoughts that have made a home in her brain, as when she whimsically muses about the uniqueness of her penmanship—a hybrid of cursive and block letters that, she says, allow her to put her thoughts down as quickly as possible: “My straight-up-and-down letters that spill out of my pen when I’m pressed up against the wall for an idea, fighting to get something out of my head onto paper, are a chubby, staccato printing and script mash-up. It’s not pretty or classy.” Overall, the essays, which pivot back and forth between six decades, are generally engaging, although a few wrap up without satisfying resolution.
Entertaining and evocative slice-of-life stories.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9798989403462
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Susan Schadt Press
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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The spirit of grace under pressure and creativity under fire animates a wonderfully diverse set of stories.
Ng selects 20 stories that illustrate why we might still read fiction in a time of disinformation and lies.
As the trials and tribulations of the 21st century have unfolded, the Best American Short Stories anthology has become a particular way of taking the temperature of each passing year. As Ng writes in her introduction to the latest group, “Short stories in particular can act like little tuning forks, helping us to clarify our own values—then allowing us to bring ourselves into alignment with what we believe. In a time when our values are being tested daily, it’s hard to think of anything more important.” Many of them are also fun to read, a quality appreciated more than ever by depressed and overwhelmed readers. The stories are ordered alphabetically, a structure maintained in the following selection, which is unfortunately limited by space. “Take Me to Kirkland,” by Sarah Anderson, is very funny, a little weird, and certainly one of Costco’s finest hours. “What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?” by Emma Binder is a cinematic mini-thriller about a trans kid visiting his hometown, terrified of being “clocked” by the people he grew up with after he saves a local from drowning. “Time of the Preacher,” by Bret Anthony Johnston, is one of several pandemic stories—in it, a snake, which may or may not be under the refrigerator, inspires a quarantine-breaking cry for help from a fence-builder’s ex-wife. Another story of that time, “Yellow Tulips,” by Nathan Curtis Roberts, also combines endearing, funny first-person narration with a more serious theme. A Mormon man in an uptight Utah suburb has to manage his developmentally disabled adult son through the complexities of quarantine. One day, he discovers that his son has “gotten into the provisions Mormons are all but commanded to keep, eating Nutella and Marshmallow Fluff from their jars.…Brig, we put these things aside for the apocalypse,’” the father says, while his son “grinned gleefully, sugary goo smeared across his lips and fingers. ‘It’s an apocalypse now!’”
The spirit of grace under pressure and creativity under fire animates a wonderfully diverse set of stories.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780063399808
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
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