Reviews

It’s no small compliment to say the worst stories of a second posthumous collection are only unremarkable when the best of them can show us the rise and fall of an entire generation in a few pages. It’s refreshing and heartening to read stories again that achieve profundity precisely by never reaching for it, instead striving to find the beauty in the quotidian.

nathansnook's review against another edition

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Reading her, I fall in love too easily. I think I have a drink in hand, eyes weary from too much sun, and listening to her stories drip drop like fine wine, she is there, a warm cheek to mine, and life is beautiful.

As a big time fan, this has got to be my favorite collection of short stories from her. They carry such range, the gothic, the funny, the drama, old age, short and scary, and what it means to be a woman. It's jam packed with too much, too sweet for my own tooth, and now I've put it on my pedestal for any kind of writer's block that bogs me down.

There's a Charlie Parker strings album mentioned in one of the short stories. April in Paris or Paris in April, I can't remember, but when I do, I think of bitching drunk women, husbands that want to leave, want to stay with, the children. Is this the one where she comes home from a late evening, early in the morning, preps the kids for school in the few hours she has to herself in her home? In her quiet? It is the blending of the resilience of women, of Lucia herself, that is fun to track from story to story. We see her in everything.

Holding it, cover to cover, the light yellow in my hand, the sharp, rough pages, it has cozied itself into the writing bible I'll only need for the rest of my life.