An unassuming and largely cheering collection of brief tales.
Schumacher presents a collection of short pieces, both fiction and nonfiction, about life, love, and assorted miscellany.
In this collection of nine stories (the author states they were written over half a century ago), readers encounter a wide variety of premises and scenarios, each captured in just a few pages. There are predominantly informational entries, like “To Whom It May Concern,” which concentrates on the distinction between bedbugs and German roaches and helpfully informs readers that, “Of the approximately fifty-three species of cockroaches found in the United States, the most common is the German cockroach, which has the habit of hatching 15 to 40 offspring at frequent intervals.” There are more traditional stories grounded in interpersonal drama, such as “State of Matrimony,” in which a woman named Katherine is counseled about her relationship with her husband, Arthur, by her friend Rea (“If there’s anyone who understands men and marriage,” Rea tells her, “it’s me”). Some of the stories are driven by whimsy, and all of them have a more-or-less obvious moral throughline. In “Change of Heart,” a crabby neighbor named Mr. Pritchett insists on blaming a cat named Esmeralda for the various items of his that have gone missing recently (“he made it a habit to inspect his garden every few hours during the day to be sure Esmeralda was nowhere in sight”), only to learn a heartwarming lesson by the tale’s end. This friendly, happy tone animates the whole of the author’s collection, carried by the simple but effective cadence of her prose. This extends even to the book’s darkest (and strongest) story, “Sing No Sad Songs,” about a woman dealing with growing old. Schumacher’s fiction is slight, but this slim volume will likely provide some wistful smiles.
An unassuming and largely cheering collection of brief tales.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9781965950487
Page Count: 82
Publisher: Peppertree Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
PERSPECTIVES
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