Darkly comical; readers will be ready for more.
In his debut short story collection, Cross realistically documents fears, loss and the complexities of relationships by glimpsing into a dozen different lives.
The 12 stories feature a cast of varied characters with one commonality: They’re all troubled by events from their past. Marty, a sixth-grade boy, resorts to violence after the death of his father; Lenny’s bad luck comes to define him; and Ronny finds a surprising ally in the son of his high school bully from years ago. Cross’ stories meditate on what it means to experience pain, and his characters demonstrate that there are many different ways of coping. The captivating first line of each story hints at the tension that follows, especially in “Hunters,” which begins: “The winter I turned twenty-seven, I followed a woman who said she might love me to a small town in Northwest Pennsylvania, a go-between place that provided me with little comfort, except maybe to say that its prospects seemed worse than my own.” The endings are usually just as enticing; mirroring reality, they aren’t clean, definitive conclusions but rather a place for readers to leave the character, confident he or she is in good hands, and move on to the next. Cross’ descriptions allow readers to conjure a clear image of each character, as evidenced by the introduction of Lenny, who was blind in his left eye, “the blackness of his pupil leaking into his iris like spilled ink.” Thematic similarities throughout the collection make it difficult for one story to stand out among the rest, but it also amounts to a pleasing consistency. It’s clear that Cross is capable of full-length fiction, which would be a welcome next step for such a talent.
Darkly comical; readers will be ready for more.Pub Date: April 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1936873074
Page Count: 195
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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: today
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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