It Will Come Back To You

by Sigrid Nunez

The first ever collection of short stories from the New York Times bestselling, National Book Award-winning author of The Friend


Over the course of thirty years, Sigrid Nunez has become one of contemporary fiction’s most beloved and distinctive voices, producing nine profound, penetrating, and singular novels celebrated by fans and critics alike. Revered for her “wry, withering wit” (NPR) and deceptively simple style combining intelligent frankness and “bright good humor” (New York Times), Nunez’s fiction offers “a world of insight into death, grief, art, and love” (Wall Street Journal) in novels “as sophisticated as they are straightforward” (New York Times Magazine).
But she has not, until now, produced a book of stories. With It Will Come Back to You, Nunez gives us thirteen stories collected in one volume. Carefully selected from three decades of work, these stories show the origins of her style as well as her incomparable range as an artist.
Moving from the momentous to the mundane, Nunez maintains her irrepressible humor, bite, and insight, her expert balance between intimacy and universality, gravity and levity, all while entertainingly probing the philosophical questions we have come to expect, such as: How can we withstand the passage of time? Is memory the greatest fiction?
What New York Times critic Dwight Garner says of Nunez’s novels is true of these stories as well: “They are short, wise, provocative, funny—good and strong company.”

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Audiobook, Literary Fiction, Collections, Contemporary

224 pages, Hardcover

First published July 14, 2026

About the author

Sigrid Nunez has published seven novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, Salvation City, and, most recently, The Friend. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Among the journals to which she has contributed are The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, Threepenny Review, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Tin House, and The Believer. Her work has also appeared in several anthologies, including four Pushcart Prize volumes and four anthologies of Asian American literature.

Sigrid’s honors and awards include a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature. She has taught at Columbia, Princeton, Boston University, and the New School, and has been a visiting writer or writer in residence at Amherst, Smith, Baruch, Vassar, and the University of California, Irvine, among others. In spring, 2019, she will be visiting writer at Syracuse University. Sigrid has also been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and of several other writers’ conferences across the country. She lives in New York City.

Reviews

[emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

i want story collections from all the authors i love.

mini-reviews for each story:

PHILOSOPHERS
one thing to love about short stories is they provide you with more opportunities to appreciate perfect titles.
rating: 4


GREENSLEEVES
this is giving literary romance to me, and therefore i love it.
rating: 4.5


IMAGINATION
stressful.
rating: 3.5


CURIOSITY
it killed the cat!

well, not really. no kittens were harmed in the making of this story.
rating: 4


AIRPORT STORY
kafkaesque, as it should be.
rating: 4


THE BALLOON
a scathing and universally recognizable portrait of a kind of man.
rating: 4


THE PLAN
stories that actually have a plot are less interesting to me than the ones in which almost nothing happens.
rating: 3.5


THE NAKED JUROR
now i'm thinking about 30 rock.

anyway i would die for this character.
rating: 4.5


IT'S ALL GOOD
these are all so weird but believable. i'm having a blast.
rating: 4


A MOTHER-DAUGHTER STORY
i knew i would love this one.
rating: 4.5


THE RABBIT'S FOOT
this is the second time recently i've read about a rabbit's foot. prior to this week i would have called it something that comes up more in childhood than in adult life.

lucky me.
rating: 4.5


HER WORRIED SISTERS
a title i hold often.
rating: 3.5


IT WILL COME BACK TO YOU
i'm so sad to see the title story, the conclusion. i don't want this to be over.
rating: 4.5


OVERALL
a collection fitting of the great honor of being sigrid nunez's first. she is allergic to missing, and this is as subtle and evocative and memorable as any of her novels. maybe more.
rating: 4.5

(thanks to the publisher for the arc)

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection takes its title from the final story, a piece in a memoir/essay style reflecting on the nature of memory in aging and other contexts. “A common response to I forget is Don’t worry, if it’s important it will come back to you. If this was ever true, it is less and less so as life goes on.” The stories also address guilt, shame, regret, trauma, anxiety, obsessions—other life stuff that keeps coming back. These stories are beautifully structured and presented in a soothing natural direct language style that makes them easily absorbing and accessible, though for me a bit melancholic. This is the sixth (and final) collection of short stories I have read for the Tournament of Books 2026 Summer Camp. It amazes me that these astoundingly excellent six story collections all came out so close in time; it’s been a sort of golden-age-of-short-story summer for me. I’m so glad the ToB organizers came up with this idea and these books for the 2026 Summer Camp!

SPOILER ALERT: Following are spoilery summaries and notes on each of the stories that are for my own attempts to process and retain all of these stories. If you wish to avoid spoilers, do not read them.

Philosophers—This story starts out by telling us that Kierkegaard wrote that the world can be divided into those who write and those who do not write; the main character reads this in old college notes she is throwing out and begins reflecting on her first love at the end of her senior high school year. The boy Ace had some health and family disadvantages, but was attractive and charming and attracted many other females, including their English teacher, Mrs. Mint, who called him “the philosopher” (why? because he often began sentences saying there were two kinds of people in the world? because he calmly accepted reality?) and openly flirted with him. He had affairs with both the MC and the teacher. The teacher wrote college recommendation letters for the MC. After graduation, Ace went off to the war in Vietnam, the MC had a miscarriage she didn’t tell Ace about, and went away to college. He only wrote to her once and she was ashamed of how bad his writing was. Once she began college, her parents split-up and moved on and she didn’t feel much connection to her hometown. Later, after she published a book, she received a letter from the teacher congratulating her on the book and telling the MC that she had married Ace after he returned safely from the war. They had a son and were happy for only two years when Ace died of cancer. Absurdly, he had survived the war, but died so soon after. The MC tells of Kierkegaard’s oddity, his pining away for the woman he loved, and his devotion to his “most faithful mistress melancholy.” And he wrote and wrote. The MC wrote. Ace and the teacher did not. Life changes, you change, you have to accept it and move on (and maybe write about it because the writer’s life itself is the faithful mistress muse to be mined for inspiration).

Greensleeves—A therapist newly separated from his wife meets, at a neighbor’s party, a younger (early 30s) woman, who wants his advice for her schizophrenic younger brother and a “docufiction” she is making about him. The therapist seems interested in her after she initiates their spending the night together, though he seems to associate her with the prostitute Lady Greensleeves of the famous ancient song (maybe because she is so obviously prostituting herself to get free access to his advice). This contrasts with his at-one-time well-adjusted responsible but not overly ambitious daughter (“a girl with an ebullient, affectionate personality whose behavior had never given her parents a day’s grief, she had been the marriage’s perpetual blessing”) who has become worrisomely depressed about the state of the world. The therapist had thought that his daughter’s more balanced, less driven approach to life had made her happier than the more driven, but at the end of this story Lady Greensleeves seems to be in a better headspace than the daughter. “For years now, he’d been seeing patients with symptoms of pre-traumatic stress disorder, emotional problems associated with uncertainty—if not outright dread—about the future. And recently this had also hit close to home.”

Imagination—Elsie, the 14-year-old daughter in this story is a complete contrast with the daughter in Greensleeves, having impulse-control issues that constantly embarrass her parents and sometimes even herself. “An inventive imagination was a gift of the gods—or a curse if you couldn’t control it.” Are Elsie’s parents overreacting, then making things worse by judging and labeling, or are they legitimately just concerned and trying to guide her? How do you tell the difference between the effects of an active and original imagination and a mental illness that might require treatment to prevent a young person from hurting herself? Elsie does think at one point, “Suppose she died young. By her own hand. The poetic-sounding phrase had always appealed to her” and she was “Awash in self-pity, trembling with the poetry of it all”. What about the stress of being judged just for existing in the physical form of yourself? “Once, after passing two elderly men sitting together on a bus, Elsie had heard one of them say to the other, ‘It’s when they’re stacked like that while they’re barely nubile that they really ought to be declared a public nuisance.’” I wonder what the reactions of the characters in this story would have been to Elsie’s behavior if she were a boy instead of a girl?

Curiosity—Phoebe, a young woman pre-law student in NYC, becomes intrigued by her same-age prostitute neighbor (Vicki/Inna) and cat in their slummish (but safe) tenement apartment building. Curiosity (and the signs of the times and the Jane Fonda movie Klute) drives Phoebe to do a substitute trick for Inna when Inna gives Phoebe her apartment key with a request to care for the cat because Inna has to rush off to Chicago because her mother is ill. Phoebe loses her boyfriend when she tells him about it, even though when she tells him he is interested and wants to reenact it. For years she fears the John will reappear, perhaps as a client of her law firm, and ruin her career, destroy her family, marriage, and friendships (that it will come back to her). I can’t help but wonder, would the same fears and standards have applied to a man in this situation (she doesn’t seem to think the male client would be worried about revealing his behavior)? Did the easing of sexual mores in the 60s and 70s make it easier for more men to get more sex while also increasing their power over women? I haven’t seen the movie Klute, but wonder whether it asserted a strong woman’s power or the delusion of power that was actually commodification?

Airport Story—One woman’s labyrinthian ordeal illustrates the horror show of delays and lack of concern for customers that commercial airline flying is these days. It’s so absurdly awful it’s almost comical.

The Balloon—A woman can’t let go of a manipulative man who goes faithlessly from one woman to the next because he made her feel beautiful, desirable, and like a kind forgiving person. Memories of him keep coming back to her, but she doesn’t want him lodged in her like a balloon that is stuck in a tree, like undisposed trash.

The Plan—This is a very creepy story from the first person point of view of a sick 23-year-old man with an above-average IQ, Roden Jones, beginning his life as a mass murderer in 1976 in the greater New York City area. He meticulously plans for his unsuspecting wife Harley to be his (first?) victim, but she luckily for her, leaves him for another man just in time to unknowingly save herself, but unfortunately leaving him to prey on a prostitute he frequents and her male housemate, the murderer telling himself “whores got murdered all the time. It was one of the things whores were for.” The high he seems to get from the crime indicates that he is likely to do it again. Background info indicates that he was devoted to his mother even though she beat him as a child, was raised Catholic, though he no longer believed, and always felt guilty after sex—even within proper marital bounds. He’d developed the “habit” of considering people who irritated him (primarily, but not exclusively, women, though they tended to irritate him more than men) as “candidates” for murder by the time he was in high school. His obsession with murder slacked off when his mother died and he was grieving, but came back to him when he met his wife, and he blamed Harley’s existence for “holding him back, preventing him from being who he was meant to be.” He had more respect for criminals than “working stiffs” and ugly attitudes and stereotypes about women.

The Naked Juror—The long-lasting reverberations of spousal-abuse trauma and guilt come back to a woman (a writer) in the context of jury duty. Flora is a potential juror on a trial of a man she recognizes as someone she slept with once many years earlier while she was married. He is accused of murdering his wife with a blunt instrument during a quarrel. Flora’s husband Ross had died at the age of 46 during one of his many intensely angry rages at her for embarrassing him and making stupid mistakes. He also had had angry rages at their two children as they grew up. The story raises issues of Flora’s credibility, perhaps because of her writer’s imagination, when she admits she imagined the murder’s blunt instrument to be a hammer and when she hears Ross in her head berating her for not seeing at once that the accused man was much too young to have been her former lover.

It’s All Good—A 70-year-old woman comes down with dementia, severely and quickly, going from asymptomatic to being unable to care for herself and remember her daughter and son in less than a year. The story is narrated by the daughter, who worries about her own memory lapses and whether heredity will come back to her. The son manages to remain upbeat about the whole thing, often saying “it’s all good.” The mother seems to develop a crush on Brad Pitt that the son indulges by getting her DVDs of Pitt’s movies, then he hires a Brad Pitt impersonator to meet them for the mother’s birthday lunch, and this bothers the daughter. Later, the daughter realizes that the mother’s thing for Pitt is because he looks like the man Perry who fathered her son and abandoned them before the son was born. Ironically, the son hates Perry who abandoned them and doesn’t realize that the similarity of Perry’s appearance to Pitt’s is the source of his mother’s infatuation. The daughter judgmentally thinks that her mother pined for Perry when she should have found a “good, decent man” who would have been a father to them. I wonder, is it like pushing prostitution to expect a single mother to find and marry a man to provide her child(ren) with a father—something I often heard urged on my own single mother.

Mother-Daughter Story—This was the most sad and unsettling story in this collection for me. The reverberations of psychological abuse and neglect by a parent come back throughout the child’s lifetime and possibly through generations. This story involves at least two mother-daughter stories. Mo had been unlucky in having an overly critical but otherwise indifferent unloving mother, yet was lucky to have a devoted loving daughter Jo, who studied psychology and understood some of her issues. There is evidence Mo repeated some of her mother’s behaviors towards Jo (critical of first serious boyfriend, tattoos, the restaurant and didn’t ask Jo about her husband and son), though to a lesser extent, and she was very attentive to Jo when the first boyfriend died and Jo was devastated. Here Jo has come back to help Mo clear out her dead mother’s home and to be a comfort to Mo. There is a letter Mo wrote to her mother as a college writing prompt based on a letter Kafka wrote to his abusive father and what happens to this letter is woven throughout the story. I wondered the extent to which Mo’s perception of her mother was completely accurate and whether her mother had also suffered abuse and/or neglect or had mental health issues. She had been considerate enough to listen to a book about Swedish death cleaning and practice it so that Mo’s job of wrapping up her mother’s affairs and possessions was a quick task. “[Jo] had learned long ago that a person who was much criticized as a child grows up to be not hardened or immune but, rather, hypersensitive.” “She understood how complicated grief was in a family like theirs. The anguish of mourning not just the death of a parent but a parent’s love that never was.”

The Rabbit’s Foot—Exploitation—isn’t that the essence of capitalism? Adopted foundling Carmine grows up to work as a housekeeper at a luxury Manhattan NYC hotel. Her two brilliant children prosper with elite college educations leading to lucrative careers. They, particularly the daughter Teresa, resent Carmine’s exploitation by the wealthy hotel owners and patrons, but Teresa’s daughter Celina resents her mother’s capitalist focus on money and admires Carmine as “salt of the earth.” The attitudes come back and go forth as one generation uses the capitalist system to escape exploitation, but then becomes the exploiter. The abandoned baby Carmine was found with a rabbit’s foot, likely placed with her by a desperate young mother who could not care for her child but hoped to send luck with the child into her future life, but the rabbit’s foot disappeared instead of staying with Carmine, probably lost or stolen by one of the comparatively powerful adults taking the baby and robbing her of her mother’s luck token. Perhaps Carmine’s fantasy-inducing brush with the profligate English lord represents the allure, excitement, and shame of exposure to and desire for wealth and power.

Worried Sisters—What should loving sisters do when one of their sisters is finally able to be in a relationship because of a medication that enables her to take things that irritate her in stride and she wants to get married, but the sisters worry that if she has to go off the medicine the marriage will fail. Should they tell the expectant groom? They write a letter to the moral-quandary columnist. That letter is this story.

It Will Come Back to You—This piece doesn’t feel like a fictional story because of its memoir/essay style. It seems autobiographical. Is it? The narrator reflects on the nature of memory, how it can be influenced by the physical (brain tumor), the senses (smell, hearing), and the random, in the context of her connection with the pandemic, its aftermath, and a woman who frequently cared for her when she was young. She considers how we fill in for lapses in memory details, whether consciously or not, because it is so innate in humans to hold onto the past that it interferes with accurate memory.

Now that we’re no longer stuck in corona time … everyone is looking ahead … everyone is full of plans.

But already you hear words of nostalgia about the pandemic. … Hospital staff who recall the brutal intensity, how they’d never known a greater sense of purpose, … People who discovered blessings in lockdown, unrestricted routines that forced them to reassess their sense of values and how they should live. … The purer air. The calm of abandoned streets.

That everything that was and is no more is to be mourned is an unsettling idea, but what other explanation can there be for the persistence of this kind of emotion? And it’s this yearning, I think, that is partly—perhaps even mostly—responsible for why we get so much wrong, for why memory is so easily overruled by fiction, and why it can be so hard, no matter how we struggle, to get at the truth of our lives.

[Ruby Yassen · Rating 4 out of 5]

“That everything that was and is no more is to be mourned is an unsettling idea, but what other explanation can there be for the persistence of this kind of emotion? And it’s this yearning, I think that is partly—perhaps even mostly—responsible for why we get so much wrong, for why memory is so easily overruled by fiction, and why it can be so hard, no matter how we struggle, to get at the truth of our lives.”

Sigrid Nunez is an incredibly good writer. I always felt like these stories ended exactly when they should have, and I never knew where they were really going, which I liked. Also love the cover of this book 🌼

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

The thirteen stories in this collection tackle heavy content touching on every possible human emotion yet they are told with wit and humor. Sometimes the characters were so flawed that I needed to reread sentences to see that yes, she really did go there.

[Phyllis · Rating 4 out of 5]

These were lovely stories. Each one gentle and comforting.

I have never read any of Sigrid Nunez‘s writing before, though I have several of her novels on my shelves. Now I am inspired to read them.

Read for the 2026 Tournament of Books short stories summer camp.

[Jolanta (knygupė) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pirmas autorės apsakymų rinkinys. Kam patiko jos romanai - turėtų patik ir šis rinkinys.

[Kennedy · Rating 4 out of 5]

An absolutely beautiful collection of stories. Each one made me feel a myriad of emotions. I had a great time with this one.

[Phoenix Woodfill]

genuinely i don’t know why i read this whole book i didn’t really like it at the start, didn’t warm up to it at the middle, and still didn’t like it at the end

[jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you so much Riverhead Books for sending me a copy of this wonderful book!

Very much a slice-of-life, observational collection of stories from the incomparable Sigrid Nunez… I loved it. So much of this explores the judgement and perceptions that individuals hold and how that impacts others as well as the individual. What a writer, each of these characters are brilliantly drawn, fully realized human beings to grapple with.

My favorite stories from the collection were The Naked Juror: jury duty, judgement and loneliness and The Rabbit’s Foot: injustice and reality versus language for survivors and their “allies”. But we tackled all kinds of things in many situations from first love, therapy, body image, mothers and daughters, hatred, memory loss and people watching. No surprise she nails it.

+ quick note, the audiobook also has multiple narrators including Rebecca Lowman, a fave of mine.

[Liz Cettina]

I literally love her

[Peter Tillman]

Dwight Garner gives this collection high marks at his NY Times review:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/13/bo...( (May be paywalled. I'm happy to email a copy to non-subscribers)
Excerpt:
"Sigrid Nunez Is One of Our Best Writers ....

Nunez has maintained in her work a mistrust of cultural hypersensitivity and thought policing, and that wariness is here too. In this collection’s first story, “Philosophers,” a teenage girl falls in love with the handsome bad boy of her dreams ....

I’d rather read one of her books than almost anyone else’s."

I'm looking forward to trying this new-to-me writer.

[Constance · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find her voice so soothing, even when the stories take a turn.

[RoxAnne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well written short stories (13 in all) on a variety of topics. Several of them, I wanted more. A few made me wonder why. One is cringey. One is heartfelt. Very good for her first book of short stories, but then she is already a good writer.

[Jessica DiBartolo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm grateful to Riverhead Books for sending me this gifted copy of 𝗜𝘁 𝗪𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗕𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝘁𝗼 𝗬𝗼𝘂 by Sigrid Nunez—out 7/14. Here are a few examples of the stories in this collection...

ɢʀᴇᴇɴꜱʟᴇᴇᴠᴇꜱ: A therapist attends his neighbor's party and finds himself stuck in a conversation with a woman in a green dress who wants to discuss her thoughts on her brother's mental health.

ᴀɪʀᴘᴏʀᴛ ꜱᴛᴏʀʏ: A woman who rarely travels ends up sleeping at the airport when her flight is canceled and no hotel rooms are available.

ᴛʜᴇ ɴᴀᴋᴇᴅ ᴊᴜʀᴏʀ: A writer who never gets selected for jury duty despite her desire to serve is startled when the defendant resembles a man from her past.

This book was my introduction to Sigrid Nunez, and I'm afraid to say that this well-respected author's understated style did not resonate with me. The prose felt sterile, and I finished each story wondering, "Why?"

I can't help but feel guilty for writing a negative review (especially for a gifted book), but I'm sure this collection will be someone else's cup of tea. It reminds me of my favorite fortune cookie message: "Alas! The onion you are eating may be someone else's waterlily."

[Mietta Yans · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice one to read as a fan of Nunez, but I couldn’t imagine taking to this much if I was fresh to her.

[belton :) · Rating 4 out of 5]

these stories were beautiful. the fact that the cover is also beautiful is a wonderful plus.

I've been wanting to read sigrid nunez for a really long time now. I actually bought her other book, What Are You Going Through, a few months ago hoping that i'd get to it soon (I didn't). When I saw that this was coming out, I thought that perhaps her short stories would be a great first introduction to nunez's work. and it was!!

all these stories were sparkling and full of life; they have plots that slowly creep up on you, and you won't even know you've been entranced by the story until you're about to finish them. one of the greatest things about this collection is that it shows how masterful nunez is at building characters and relationships. these people—all their flaws, their secrets, their desires, their yearnings, their regrets—are incredibly realistic and fully fleshed out. the author takes rather everyday scenarios and elevates them to reveal something deeper about humanity and our truths, how we live, and why we do the things we do. there's a lot to be said in this book about memory, performance (and whether we can truly know another person because of it), family relationships, therapy, class and money, and so much more.

while all of these stories are great, my personal favorites were: Greensleeves, Imagination, Curiosity, Airport Story, and It Will Come Back To You. That's probs about half the collection LOL but that just means there are a ton of bangers in here. Time for a mini review of all of them!

PHILOSOPHERS (3.5 stars): this one was a very interesting first story. teacher-student relationships, Kierkegaard, writing, people being split into two different categories, etc., etc. I liked this one, but it didn't really wow me.

GREENSLEEVES (4 stars): a wonderful character study, as well as complicated relationships. this is one of those stories that slowly creep up on you—I didn't realize how much I liked this one until a day after finishing it.

IMAGINATION (4.5 stars): holy cow. the ending of this story just does it for me. that's really all I have to say. one of the best endings to a short story I have ever read.

CURIOSITY (4 stars): the ending to this story is also so wonderfully written. i don't know if this makes me miss the days when we used to be close to our neighbors or not.

AIRPORT STORY (5 stars): this one is so, so brilliant. It was almost a thrilling read for me, watching the main character make her way through a chaotic airport—I guess it's also a thrilling read for me because she basically lived through one of my worst nightmares. I think out of the entire collection, this is the story I remember best.

THE BALLOON (3 stars): one of the more forgettable ones, in my opinion, especially since it comes after an absolute banger. I didn't really have any strong opinions toward this one.

THE PLAN (4 stars): By this point, I've finally learned that nunez just knows how to end a story really, really well. this is about a guy who dreams of strangling literally everyone he meets—what could possibly go wrong?

THE NAKED JUROR (4 stars): I've never done jury duty before, and this story slightly made me want to. a sudden (yet perhaps unwanted?) intimacy formed between a juror and the defendant. brilliantly written.

IT'S ALL GOOD (4 stars): an odd one, but still great. brb I'm looking up Brad Pitt lookalikes now to hire for my next birthday party :D

MOTHER-DAUGHTER STORY (4.5 stars): oh god. I loved this one. a stunning portrait of parent-child relationships and intergenerational trauma.

THE RABBIT'S FOOT (4.5 stars): this one also slowly creeped up on me. the ending, like so many other ones, was perfect. about money, class, socioeconomic status, and how the upper class treat the lower class—with a bit of family dynamics sprinkled in there as well. literally what more could I have possibly asked for.

WORRIED SISTERS (4 stars): this one is a thinker, in which I mean, it remains on your mind long after you read it. because I majored in psychology, this was also something I thought about all the time—does medicine get rid of your true self, or does it only bring out the true self that's acceptable within society? is it right to give someone medicine for the rest of their life if it means altering their personality and who they are?

IT WILL COME BACK TO YOU (4.5 stars): the title story!!!! yes, this was wonderful, absolutely gorgeous. a beautiful ending. about memory and the stories we tell ourselves to protect ourselves, i think it perfectly encapsulates the themes of the entire collection and adds a nice conclusion to it all.

Overall, it's an excellent collection with so few misses that I think everyone should just take a chance and read them all. nunez is a beautiful writer, one that truly knows how to explore the human condition in such everyday scenarios. i can't wait to read more of her work. ok bye!!!!!

[Sophia Eck]

Comprehensively witty and decently humorous, these collected stories touch on significant topics such as personal grief, emotional projection, familial dynamics, mortal illness, etc. in very differing and curious narratives, and in lighter ways than the aforementioned topics would usually insist upon. I found myself decently entertained throughout, a feat for a short story collection, despite some of the stories having slightly jarring and presumptive sudden plops of deeper details, not fully cohesive to the story in a way that it felt like their cohesion was sacrificed for a more concise length. But, if you enjoy short story collections, this one is still worth checking out! I found myself comparing it to swiss cheese; Generally satisfying despite its potential holes.

[Jackie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adored this book. The short stories were to each their own incredible. They were each individually relatable to some point in my own life and did not make me cringe at the modern words of uber, or covid, ect. Strong stories that I will probably read again are Greensleves, Airport Stories, The Plan, and Curiosity. Oh and Imagination!! Nunez’s take on the boy who cried wolf was beautifully illustrated in a modernized way.

I was recommended this book by a friend who knew I loved short stories, and that the cover was intriguingly stunning.

[Lilli Hirth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, there were parts I enjoyed and others I didn’t… but to be quite honest, I feel as if I don’t remember these short stories! And it’s only been a week since I read it!! What even?!?! I mean, there were little gems and fantastic little nuggets sprinkled throughout the book, and I did indeed find it compelling, but as a lasting testament to the short story? Surely not. That may sound harsh, but note the three star review and the fact that I did think this was a decent collection.

[John Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

New to me, Nunez is an NBA winner for her book The Friend (2018). This collection of 13 short stories (1992-2025) is solid, possessing a "warm and unadorned style," as one put it.
One of my favorite stories - Balloon - is also the shortest and the oldest.
Other standouts include
Greensleeves
Curiosity
The Plan (eerie and disturbing)
Rabbits Foot
It Will Come Back to You

[Marilyn Boyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this collection. There was only one story, which started in a different, more traditional, distancing tone, that I wasn’t sure of, but as it progressed, I became engrossed and found it equally as startlingly good as the others. So glad to have discovered her short stories, as well as her novels.

[Elena · Rating 3 out of 5]

moved quickly but not the most memorable of her work… i think Sigrid Nunez does best in first person. favorite stories were the Brad Pitt impersonator one “It’s All Good” and the murderer one “The Plan”

[Emily Jenkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

This likely wasn’t the right book to be introduced to Sigrid Nunez, as her writing style was a bit impersonal to me. However, I enjoyed the variety and she certainly captures a range of emotions.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I typically steer clear of short story collections unless they are authored by a writer whom I particularly admire. Sigrid Nunez, the National Book award winner for her novel “The Friend,” has released a debut short-story collection that will curb my reluctance to engage with short stories. Gathering thirteen stories that span three decades, Nunez delivers vivid portraits of the everyday and the strange that are moving, honest and heartfelt.

There is no central theme in Nunez’s collection, but there is not a flat sentence in any of the stories (and many witticisms worthy of underlining — “There was a kind of person who said, Let’s split the check, and the kind who reminded you you’d had the extra beer.”). Nunez’s strength is her ability to fully describe a character in a few sentences. Mrs. Mint, the teacher in the opening story is described as “an unhappy woman with tastefully teased hair and large distracting breasts. Her aura was that of a woman whose husband had married her for those breasts and was now tired of her.” In “Greensleeves,” a therapist whose wife had recently left him, assumes that he was invited to his neighbor’s soirée because the building gossip “must have passed on to the widow in 14-F that the wife in 14-A — the tall one with the nice clothes and her nose in the air — had moved out.” Then there is Dick Franz, an architect, with flowing grey hair and furry eyebrows with “his look of a warlock.”

Several of the stories feature characters who harbor dark secrets. In “Curiosity,” the unnamed narrator, a woman who lived in a tenement building on the Lower East Side between college and law school, recounts how her neighbor, Inna, entertained a “constant trickle” of mostly middle-aged men in business suits. When Inna’s mother was hospitalized in Chicago, Inna asked the narrator to watch her skinny cat that the narrator describes as “Audrey Hepburn transformed by a spell.” When the narrator is tending to the cat, a john arrives, blurts out that the narrator is “not Vicki,” and then a “bewitched voice said, ‘Would you like something to drink?’” The narrator uses her share of the fee to purchase a vintage motorcycle jacket that she had been coveting. “The Plan” introduces a serial killer, Rosen James, “the last guy we would have suspected,” who plans his unfaithful wife’s demise because although he didn’t know what he was going to do with his life, “he felt that Harley was in the way. Her very existence was holding him back, preventing him from being who he was meant to be.” But, someone with a “sarcastic streak,” or “stuck up,” or “obnoxiously loud mouthed or conceited or dumb” could be a candidate.

The standout title story presents a woman who is taking “the inevitable weakening of memory that comes with aging hard.” She reflects on her Aunt Gilda, who lives in a senior housing complex, and has just turned eighty-none, but her memory is better than that of many her age. She also comes to understand that “[a]s memory fails, imagination steps in.” Gilda was a family friend who was unable to have children after a botched abortion, and whom the narrator “sometimes went to live when my mother had trouble remembering that she had a daughter.” Although her mother described Gilda with disparaging words like “tramp” and “trash,” the narrator wanted to look just like Gilda when she grew up. Thank you Riverhead and and Net Galley for an advance copy of this story collection that is a worthy addition to an impressive body of work.

[CB_Read · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've always wondered what Sigrid Nunez's short stories might be like. I'm a huge fan of her novels for many reasons; there is a tenderness, directness, and charmingly dry sense of humor to Nunez's writing that I never tire of and that can be found in all of these stories. They challenge our sensibilities beginning with "Philosophers," and in a way I was reminded of last year when I read Katherine Dunn's only short story collection "Near Flesh" -- each story is an opportunity to take an interesting and precise premise and run with it for 30 minutes (or less), about how long each story takes to read. But all of these stories are worth savoring.

My favorites that excelled at delivering on this formula are "Airport Story" and "The Naked Juror." The women at the heart of these stories, like many of the women Nunez writes, are curious and generous but find themselves taken advantage of in one way or another and are personally set back by the actions of others. We see these transgressions coming in a way that our protagonists do not, and yet we share their sense of shock and wonder at how people (strangers) can be so cruel and uncaring amidst the acts of daily life. Women especially must keep their guard up in this world of ours.

The story "It's All Good" was my favorite overall. It touches on one of Nunez's most common subjects: the realities of aging and the awakening that comes from taking care of a loved one, a stranger, a pet, or more generally "our mute and helpless," as she mentions in this story. Caregiving brings on a change of circumstance and personality that is not voluntary, but it doesn't have to be rejected either. It can be lovingly, or stubbornly, embraced. The older I get the more I realize that caregiving will be a big part of my future in one way or another, and this is a lesson you're never too young to learn; it is a core tenet behind much of Nunez's writing.

A few of the stories didn't resonate with me but that's totally okay because the ones that did really struck me, as I expected them to do.

Also, one of my favorite lines of the collection: "But food is the only sex I have" (LOC 1886). That one still has me thinking.

And one of my favorite passages, from the title story: "Certainly it made no difference to me. The point was for me to listen, not to set the record straight. For whom would I be setting the record straight? And aren't we all unreliable narrators of our own lives? I see in her the little novelist that sits in each of us busily working to arrange experience into story. The idea that a human life isn't like a novel, that there is no plot, no narrative arc, that our memories can't be relied on for shit, and that everything depends on how much spaghetti the chimpanzee put in the pot--this the human heart will not have" (LOC 2391).

[Matt Watts · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a strong, somewhat uneven collection of short stories. Many of them seem to take place sometime in the middle of the 20th century, although it’s not always clear. Some of the stories are truly masterful and the way Nuñez weaves between characters and scene and reminiscence is amazingly smooth and compelling.

She’s capable of drawing you forward through the story with almost no apparent artifice and the writing in that way is if not un paralleled certainly not bettered. But while some stories and with a perfect sense of frisson others just seem to peter out without a strong sense of purpose or meaning.

And this way, I wonder if the quality of some stories means that I am rating the others too harshly, but reading them back to back it’s hard not to.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my first book by this author. Sigrid Nunez has the ability to pull you in to a short story quickly and easily, and while you can get hooked with where she takes you, you are not disappointed or left wanting since the story is a dose enough to let your imagination run. I enjoy short stories in their completion, but really wished each story connected a bit more (rather than a book that reads like chapters but is each a separate story in itself). I would recommend this book if you are looking for something to inspire you or help you know what is possible in your own creative writing process.

[Reader]

I loved The Friend, and was blown away by What Are You Going Through. Those slim novels honored her essay roots, but were functional moving human narratives too.

The Vulnerables felt like autopilot, and unfortunately, these stories are similarly algorithmic. Each sparse “story” on aging, longing, and sex fails to challenge your initial impression by the end, and contrived references to Kafka or whoever feel sophomoric . It’s barely 200 pages, but I was thankful when it ended.

It’s giving Washed.

[Tom Holehan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoy cleansing the palate once in a while with a short story collection and Sigrid Nunez is one of this country's most highly regarded writers. As with most collections, there will inevitably be some stronger stories than others. Here, however, I thought all were of a good level with the writer showing why she is considered one of the best in the business. I did find many of the conclusions, though, rather abrupt and puzzling leaving me to appreciate the quality of the writing while questioning the end results.

[Léana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not usually a short stories reader, I had a hard time getting into the book simply because I could not connect with the characters as much as I usually do with novels. But Sigrid Nunez writing is remarkable which is why the 3⭐️ rating.
This collection of short stories is a reminder of how individual it is to each of us to decide on how to live our lives, wether it is by spreading kindness or darkness, and to appreciate the privilege of day to day mundanity when it comes.