Aftermath: Stories

by Scott Nadelson

THE CHARACTERS IN SCOTT NADELSON’S third collection are living in the wake of momentous events-- the rupture of relationships, the loss of loved ones, the dissolution of dreams, and yet they find new ways of forging on with their lives, making accommodations that are sometimes delusional, sometimes destructive, sometimes even healthy. In “Oslo,” a thirteen-year-old boy on a trip to Israel with his grandparents grapples with his father’s abandonment and his own rocky coming-of-age. In “The Old Uniform,” a young man left by his fiancée revisits the haunts of his single days, and on a drunken march through nighttime Brooklyn, begins to shed the false selves that have kept him from fully living. And in the title story, a couple testing out the waters of trial separation quickly discover how deeply the fault lines of their marriage run and how desperately they want to hang onto what remains. Mining Nadelson’s familiar territory of Jewish suburban New Jersey, these fearless, funny, and quietly moving stories explore the treacherous crossroads where disappointments meet unfulfilled desire.

Genres: Short Stories

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Scott Nadelson grew up in northern New Jersey before escaping to Oregon, where he has lived for the past eighteen years. He has published three collections of short stories--Aftermath, The Cantor's Daughter, and Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories--and a memoir, The Next Scott Nadelson: A Life in Progress. His newest books are the novel, Between You and Me and the story collection The Fourth Corner of the World (Engine Books, 2018). He is the winner of the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award, and the Oregon Book Award for short fiction, and his work has been cited as notable in both the Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays anthologies. Nadelson teaches creative writing at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon and in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University.

Reviews

[Andy Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well written collection of short stories by Scott Nadelson. Many had a common theme, a young man struggling with life but mainly devastated by the loss of a fiancee, girlfriend, or wife. In fact, the similarity of stories, including settings in New Jersey/New York, focus on characters who are Jewish but not devout, educated young people working in blue collar jobs, caused me to read them over time interspersed with reading other books so that the stories would not blur into each other.

The ending story, West End, was written from the view point of a young woman who moves back to her hometown to take care of her dying father also includes a break up with her longtime boyfriend. At first, I thought this story was going to be the same theme but from a different perspective, that of a young woman. However, the young woman narrator does not suffer from the break up, in fact she is in many ways relieved and she ended up having more in common with the women in the other stories who simply moved on than with the male protagonists in those stories whose broken hearts kept them tethered to their pre break up lives. Good read!!