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

224 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication 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

[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).

[Liz Cettina]

I literally love her