Upstate

by Ben Tanzer

Featuring dark character studies of childhood, middle age, and (lack of) grace under pressure, these stories are among the best work of Tanzer's career, and voracious fans of his writing will surely be pleased and satisfied to have these small masterpieces collected together into one easy-to-read volume. So take a stool at Thirsty's, order another Yuengling, and be prepared to be transported into the rusted soul and blackened heart of the American small-town, as one of our nation's best contemporary authors takes us on a remarkable journey to a place full of love and lust and gin and sin. Previously published as The New York Stories, this classic collection has been revised and edited, and includes a new introduction by Tortoise Books publisher Gerald Brennan.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories

228 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 17, 2015

About the author

Emmy-award winner Ben Tanzer's acclaimed work includes the short story collection UPSTATE, the science fiction novel Orphans and the essay collections Lost in Space and Be Cool. His recent novel The Missing was released in March 2024 by 7.13 Books and was a Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year finalist in the category of Traditional Fiction and his new book After Hours: Scorsese, Grief and the Grammar of Cinema, which Kirkus Reviews calls "A heartfelt if overstuffed tribute to the author’s father and the ameliorative power of art," was released by Ig Publishing in May 2025. Ben is also the host of the long running podcast This Podcast Will Change Your Life and lives in Chicago with his family.

Reviews

[Ben]

It changed my life.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review to come

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love that these stories are all finally out together and in print. I've been on this ride from the beginning, never questioning going all the way to the end. Some of these stories were my first experience with Tanzer, and I kept going back for more. It was great to watch this develop over the years, but it's best that everything is together now because as I read more and more of these stories as time went on I increasingly realized how much they were a part of a single big picture. I couldn't wait until it was complete to read the individual pieces, but now readers don't have to wait. It's all here and I picked up my own print copy so I'd have it all together. Do the same and get ready to change your life.

Here are my reviews from the individual pieces as they came out so you can see my reactions to each as I came across them and the developing whole while it was still in the process of developing:

- "Repetition Patterns" This is my first experience with one of Tanzer's books, and I couldn't be more thrilled. I love how Tanzer manages to squeeze so much description in without really seeming like he's doing it. The prose is still tight and clean, but more is there than it seems and there are some real poetic phrasings here and there. I love the way the stories proceed as well. Tanzer manages to be both hard hitting and mournfully yearning at the same time, the stories being extremely tender gut-shots. This is a marvelous short collection and I'm definitely going to check out more of Tanzer's work.

- "So Different Now" Again Tanzer makes me nostalgic for a past that isn't mine while putting me in a present I'm not sure I want to be in, yet greedily don't want to look away from. I can't believe I missed that this was out there, only realizing there was a second volume when "After the Flood" dropped recently. I grabbed this one as soon as I realized, and "After the Flood" as well. And these stories only whet my appetite more for "After the Flood." They make me feel raw, not in execution (because they are definitely well crafted) but in the emotional state evoked while reading. Tanzer has some breathtaking endings in some of these as well, heavy gut shots there was no way I could see coming but might fight someone if they suggested it could be any other way. Bottom line? Heavy stories. Heavy and great. I'm already itching to dig into "After the Flood," but I'm going to sit and savor these ones a few days first. They deserve it.

- "After the Flood" This is a marvelous finishing volume. It easily has as much emotional force as the other two volumes, but with something even more haunting about each of the stories. These stories could easily stand on their own, but it's so much more interesting to see the reflections and emanations between the stories of all three volumes as a whole. The best stuff in this volume though isn't something I can convey by description. It isn't that tangible, too subtle and delicate despite the simultaneous presence of that which is harsh and brutal in life. You really need to read it, and then you'll know.

[Behnam Riahi · Rating 5 out of 5]

The following review has been copied from http://behnamriahi.tumblr.com


The New York Stories, written by Ben Tanzer and published by the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, is a short-story collection set in the fictional town of Two Rivers, New York. A small region of only a few hundred predominantly Caucasian folk with a startlingly high rate of cancer, Two Rivers is turned upside down when the storm of the century rocks the town off its foundations. Suddenly, the adulterous attitudes and excessive alcoholism of its denizens are brought to light. And with their homes boarded up against the storm and with nowhere to go, the people of Two Rivers cannot escape their long, unforgivable histories anymore. Those who try to are swept up in the flood, never to return again.

Two Rivers reminds me a little too much of my own “hometown,” Varna, IL. Varna isn’t actually my hometown—I was raised in Aurora, the suburbs of Chicago, but Varna was my post-high school, small-town experience. My grandparents used to live there and my mom and her brothers and sisters were essentially raised there. It’s the town she lived in when she had my older brother, when she met my father, and then when she had me and my younger brother. It’s the town that still considers me and my younger brother the “Nerad boys,” based on my mother’s maiden name, even though my last name is Riahi. Because our mom was white, these people have always considered us to be one of them, assuming that we’re of Greek or Italian heritage than actually acknowledging that we’re middle-eastern. And it’s there that I first discovered what it means when people spend their waning years looking back on their life and realizing that they never did anything. I guess it’s no surprise that I had to leave.


(Image of the old, broken down garage brought to you by roadarch.com. I always wanted to steal that Buick sign for no good reason.)

If there’s one thing that I don’t like about this book, it’s the distinct lack of character descriptions. When we begin a story, we jump right in, but we’re only given the appearances of maybe a handful of characters at most, which isn’t much considering the book is defining a whole town. Since most of the stories are written from the first-person point-of-view of men, most of the descriptions are of women—their hair, their lips, their boobs. However, part of me is reluctant to call this a weakness in the context of the whole collection. Ultimately, based on my own experiences, that’s simply how it is. Everyone tends to be white, carbon copies from an all too recycled gene pool, and at the very most, they’ll acknowledge differences like weight, hair recession, and the small things that they themselves could embody given time. Otherwise, when you meet another fella, he may as well as be exactly like you, just another near-clone. Though Tanzer never addresses this, it does capture the small-town mindset accurately. And when paired with the ongoing infidelity and alcoholism of the characters, it paints an accurate depiction of what a small town really is. Just infinitely the same thing, the same people, the same emptiness, day-in and day-out. By not belaboring on contrived character descriptions, the stories are made briefer too, in addition to building narrative distance from characters that the author doesn’t necessarily want to us to like. It’s an honest approach to writing quick, self-contained short stories with characters that serve as both a protagonist and a villain, heroes who consumed by fantasies about cheating on their wives to rescue some past love from an imagined hardship. After all, in a small town like Two Rivers, a good man can be hard to find.

That’s what Varna was for me too. I worked at a Casey’s General Store—a convenience store, gas station, pizzeria, restaurant, cafe, and DVD rental all wrapped up into one convenient package. A jack of all trades as far as businesses go, it sucked at just about everything. Sometimes, I still get flyers in the mail for special deals they have, and I’m astounded by the lack of black people in the photos. Anyway, apart from whatever bar was running at the time, it was about the only dining that was open in town. Most of our local industry came from the massive, monolithic grain silos, visible from miles off, that cast a shadow across the quiet hovels of the neighborhood. Trucks came in and trucks left, packed to the gills with corn or wheat or whatever was planted at the time. The drivers were usually locals, stopping in for a can of chew and a six-pack of shitty beer or a bottle of Boone’s Farm flavored “wine” on their way home. Those that didn’t work in the silos worked on farms, coursing through pig shit and juggling pig testicles, or at the glass factory in the next town over, occasionally losing an extremity to any number of open hazards sitting about there. There wasn’t much else besides some lousy diners in the nearby towns, a mail delivery service, and a post office, next to the funeral home, not far from a shady looking candle-making business. But it was the three churches in a town barely surpassing 300 people that really pulled in the money. Still, we had a bank, we had a bar, we had a volunteer fire department. Job openings weren’t common—once you got in one, you stuck with it, but that’s about all you needed. Just enough to raise a family, right? That’s what Varna wanted to be, at least. It ain’t much to look at from the outside though. There weren’t any minorities in town when I lived there, except for my younger brother and me. In fact, outsiders in general were made to feel unwelcome. Hell, even locals, in some cases, were meant to feel like outcasts, and thus there was a subculture within the population of renowned alcoholics, drug addicts, and anyone with an alternative lifestyle. My brothers made great friends with those people, though even among them, I felt like I didn’t belong. It seemed to me the only way to belong was to have no expectation for the future at all—because it didn’t matter if you belonged to the major populace or lived among the alternatives. Either way, you were going nowhere.


(Photo of the Varna strip by Bruce Wicks. One of the commenters on this photo asked, “Where are all the people?” The easy answer? Most of the folks who used these buildings commercially are in the cemetery.)

Ben Tanzer’s strength lies in his recurring characters. It’s a small enough town, right? So some characters are going to come back, you figure. And they do across the span of several years—some stories of children later unfold when we see those little boys and girls turn into confused, fucked up adults. When one marriage ends, another begins and we find that protagonist’s ex-wife as a different protagonist’s wife. Though, not all the stories are told from the point-of-view of men either. Sometimes, we see women discover their independence again, or embrace it in the wake of the oncoming storm. Many of the protagonists are children, and sometimes, the point-of-view is from a collective community. Either way, these characters often return, and sometimes, they’ve learned something from the things they lost. At other times, they come back as fresh as we left them, as befuddled and lost as they once were when they first set out into the world, setting out yet again into the storm. It’s because of this, it’s easy to develop a relationship with these characters as they struggle through the strife of that begets Two Rivers, in spite of the narrative distance built by a lack of description. We knew that this character when he was just a kid, after all, so it’s really easy to maintain your relationship with him, even if you kind of hated Stevey or Frank or any of those assholes when they were just in high school. And seeing them as children before watching them succumb to their fate is what makes this book brilliant. It’s not quite the same way that Salinger or Ellis bring characters back around again, almost as a masturbatory reference to their other works, because it’s just as important to the later stories that you saw the past stories in order to understand the full circle that some of these characters take, even if those past stories aren’t directly referenced. Like a chain, they link together, but each link alone still makes a full circle.

I don’t go back to Varna much. I don’t miss it. I write about it sometimes. There’s a few short stories that are published and unpublished, but I don’t grow anymore by seeing it. It’s just a nice place to make a social commentary through. It’s a nice void to keep regular characters trapped in, occasionally springing them from their purgatory by moving them to a major city or suburb. I find it easy to write about small towns, because of the vacuum that they exist in. The characters are totally unaffected by whatever’s going on in the world, besides their preconceived notions about what the world actually is. It’s like they’re surrounded by only themselves, with only themselves to damn or worship, without being affected by external forces—and when you do invite an external force in, it makes writing the story that much easier. Living in the city, we’re enacted on by new things all the time. Places like Varna or Two Rivers are subject to repetition, and by introducing a new character or incident, you immediately have a story. It’s even easier to write a character that just desperately wants to leave that void. You don’t need to know why he wants to leave, because who wouldn’t? It’s simply a truth to the lives some people live there. I encourage you, my audience, to check out a story that I published a couple of years ago. It’s called Needle in a Haystack, and you get it in Criminal Class Review, Volume 5. To acquire a copy, just email criminalclasspress[at]gmail[dot]com to place an order.


(It’s about a punk rock kid who needs to ditch the small town. He thinks he’s special, but he really isn’t.)

Tanzer’s got a unique strength that normally keeps me from writing more short stories. He knows when to simply end. Usually, it’ll end on a phrase or an action directly following the climax, and we don’t necessarily get to see the repercussions of it. While this is a weakness in novels, it becomes a strength in Tanzer’s short stories because he doesn’t linger on things that might be considered unimportant within the context of the collection as a whole. It also makes this book a quick read, jumping through several voices in one sitting. Because of the repeating characters though, it pleads with the audience to keep reading further, in case the protagonists from the previous story appear again. And with such sharp, poignant endings, you want to know what happens to them too. This combination of recurring characters and stunted endings makes this book as engaging as it is entertaining, taking us before, during, and after the flood through carefully crafted arcs and meaningful character growth in the wake of problems that are made all too unfortunate as a result of their domesticity. The further I dove in, the more I wondered if any of the characters from this book appeared in any of Tanzer’s other books. In some way, in spite of everything that happened to Two Rivers, I’m still curious about its fate—whether the regular bar, Thirsty’s, persevered, if the source of recurring cancer was ever found, or if VHX still holds the highest Pac-Man score.

There ain’t much else in Varna. I imagine if it suffered the same storm that Two Rivers did, there wouldn’t be much left of the closed-minded, drug-addled philistines that built the town. The grain silos would perish like chaff in the wind, the strip would be stripped, and the wasteland that is Varna would be made into a literal wasteland. I do have some memories there though—I lost my virginity to a girl from a bigger town up north at my place on the outskirts of Varna. I had my first job in town, where I first got a taste of the adult hardships that awaited me. I was even living there when I went back to college, because where else would I go? What I remember most of all is the harvesting process every fall—a red, feathery chaff rained across the town. They called it red dog, and it came from the grain silos. There were some theories that it caused autism or that it created abnormal asthma conditions, but there was something beautiful about it. It coated the town, and each narrow street was carpeted in red, like a crimson snow that drifted in from the scarlet dawn. Though I had to sweep it away from the steps leading up to the Casey’s on a regular basis, there was something innately beautiful in the way it fell from the wind, carried to the earth with no true destination. Even after I’ve forgotten all about Varna—all about the life that I hated there—that’s the one thing that I’ll never forget. That’s what made it my home.


(Don’t blink. You’ll miss it.)

Home is a difficult thing to understand, but Tanzer built one with this book. With moments that bring tears to the eyes and others that disgusted me beyond what I thought I was capable of, Tanzer also made me laugh, wonder, and feel excited to see Two Rivers again and again. Unlike Varna, there are some homes that we’ll always be happy to return to—I only wish we could go back to Two Rivers again, before the flood, before it all came crashing down around them. Even if it’s exactly the same as the home I left, it’s home nonetheless.

[Jason Pettus · Rating 5 out of 5]

[DISCLOSURE: I am the owner of the small press that published this book.]

I'm happy to say that CCLaP is finally getting its original books finished and online a lot faster this year than we ever have before; and here's our book for this coming June, the long-awaited compilation of every story Ben Tanzer has ever written in the last ten years about the fictional upstate New York town of Two Rivers. Many of you are of course already familiar with Tanzer and some of these stories -- he's grown in the last decade from just another beginning writer here in Chicago to one of the most respected and nationally popular, and nearly every one of these 33 stories have already been published in one lit journal or another over the years, not to mention as three small books from CCLaP as well. Put together for the first time, though, it's easy now to see the remarkable, almost magical way that Tanzer has been building in callbacks to a shared set of characters and locations within these stories the entire time, and how they hold together not just as a series of isolated pieces but as an incredibly well-working whole, a book that miraculously reads as if it had been centrally planned all at once, not written piecemeal over the course of nine years. This is one of the most exciting and anticipated books we've ever published, and we predict that it will also be one of our most popular in our entire history, so make sure to get on top of it now so that you too can be part of the national conversation about it this coming summer.

We are actively seeking lots of feedback for this title, so are sending a free ebook to each and every Goodreads member who wants one. To request your own copy, simply drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com, or just send me a message here. I look forward to seeing what you think of it!

[Leesa]

I LOVE BEN TANZER BOOKS. And I was a lucky girl to be able to blurb this one.
"Ben Tanzer's stories are both familiar and surprising, a scarf and a knife. Stories full of people we know, love. People we don't want to know, don't want to love. Stories full of desire and sadness and almost. Stories over beers and tequila, stories inside sex and storms. Ben! He is one of my favorites for all sorts of reasons and one of those reasons is yes and another is hell yes."

AND ALSO. I read these stories and feel. You should read them too.

[Hosho · Rating 5 out of 5]

I discovered Tanzer fairly early on, but not early enough to catch most of these stories when they were first published. The collector in me loves it when a press collects loads of early, often out-of-print work into a new book – and The New York Stories does just that, and does it gorgeously.

When read all together, the patchwork Tanzer weaves can finally be truly appreciated. It reminds me of Don Carpenter's The Class of '49 – which, if you know Carpenter, is high praise. Tanzer's characters weave in and out here, and the fictional town of Two Rivers very much becomes a character of its own. As for the people – they run the gamut from fully broken or insane to pensive and almost content. Their relationships are laid bare as fragile and tenuous arrangements, forever just a twist (or storm) from breaking apart.

And it's that edge, the intimacy of love as it is tested, that truly powers the collection. Page after page the book is fraught with the tension of potential heartbreak, and doubt, with infidelity, with mortality...making The New York Stories all the more immediate, approachable, and human.

[Giano Cromley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Midway through this book one of the narrators says: "Some of us leave home and come back. Some of us never leave." This book explores the particular draw that pulls people back to the places of their birth and upbringing, places that hold mostly pain, sorrow and regret. The characters here spend their time retracing their lives, trying to pinpoint where things went wrong, and occasionally finding solace in another fellow seeker, if not outright absolution.

The true joy to gain from reading this series of vignettes and stories, is to view these poor souls as so many insects caught in a spider's web. One person's struggles in this story here, cause vibrations for another person trapped in another part of the web. Ideas and words reverberate through time and through all the entwined lives. Nothing is ever quite forgotten; no action is without consequences. It is a delicate and complex web the author has woven here, and it is endlessly fascinating.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't have any preconceived notions when i received this book, though excitement was high from the gift itself. Then, I found out I loved reading the stories! Only one thing could make it better: the author reading them aloud (discussed this and more on Twitter - there's also a video of author reading one of the stories available). Okay, enough semi-coherent fan-girling from me, yeah I liked the stories.

[Lavinia Ludlow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review here: http://thenextbestbookblog.blogspot.c...

[Mathieu Cailler · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gritty and gorgeous look at the beauty within the mundane. Ben Tanzer is one hell of a writer, and I'm a better man and writer for having read his work.

[Joshua Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ben Tanzer's collection of short stories, Upstate, starts like a John Cougar Mellencamp album — familiar places and folks living lives like people you may know or imagine knowing. As the good and not-so-good people of Two Rivers stories entwine, there is a growing undercurrent of the unraveling to come.

What I love about Tanzer's stories is where you are left when they end. Abruptly. Single moments of lives spun up from the ether of the storm we are all dreaming together but whose taste lingers only on our tongues. With Upstate, Tanzer gives us the little pink houses instead of the empty town of a Hopper painting. We get the feeling of Two Rivers through it's inhabitants lives, not the veneer or the version they want you to see.

[Dave Newman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even better in a re-issue. Ben Tanzer is a hip Sherwood Anderson, and Upstate is his Winesburg. Great stuff.

[Darrin Doyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Terrific collection of Tanzer's work, which is deceptively simple on the surface and consistently surprising upon reflection.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was a terrific honor to take an early look at Ben Tanzer's new book. The guy's a bottomless keg of talent. I'm still drunk.

Really, it's kind of unfair how easy he makes it all seem.

My blurb:

"In his beautiful and deeply American The New York Stories, Ben Tanzer returns to the upstate place where it all began: childhood, adolescence, the buds of adulthood. Caterpillar guts ooze out on the pavement, as do restless hearts. 'Thirsty's still serves beer, the Susquehanna River still flows, and you are here by the window, watching, waiting, wondering how you got here at all.' Characters may come and go and circle back in the fictional town of Two Rivers, but through it all Tanzer's voice is a transporting constant: intimate, immediate, full of wisdom and grace. Spanning three masterful volumes, brimming with lust and longing, humor and heartbreak and a healthy helping of what-ifs, this collection is for anyone who has lived and loved or loved and lost or any whirling, churning combination of the three. In other words, it's for all of us."

[Dave Newman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was lucky enough to read an ARC of The New York Stories and blurb it. Excellent book by an excellent writer. Here's my blurb:

The millions of unseen things that happen inside the heart finally start to come clear in Ben Tanzer’s The New York Stories. Everyone here—from the teenage girls to the grown men trying to sleep with them, from the guy in therapy to the therapist—is filled with a desire so painful it will make you ache. Come to Thirsty’s and drink a Yuengling because it might be all there is. Ben Tanzer knows that what we love most is what destroys us and what makes us feel most alive. He’s reached into our music collections and pulled out the soul and the funk and the loud guitars and set it to prose that pulls us all across the page. Be prepared to laugh and cry and be swept away.

[Jason Fisk · Rating 5 out of 5]

After I read Tanzer’s, The New York Stories, I found myself dissecting the collection like a sommelier in training, sorting out the flavors as the wine hits the palate. I detected hints of Sherwood Anderson’s, Winesburg, Ohio, or Edgar Lee Masters’, Spoon River Anthology, in that through glimpses of these characters’ lives, we are able to see a larger picture of a place. There were also hints of Raymond Carver detected in the stories. Like much of Carver’s work, they were intense and portrayed a gritty realism. Like a good bottle of wine, I sat down and consumed the After the Flood portion of the collection in one sitting. Dark, but very satisfying.

[Ken · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's a lot to love in these stories of relationships, ennui, confusion and love.

Here's a great part:

"...I leave when my time is up, and I re-enter the real world, and reality, no longer as supported or safe as I just was in the protective cocoon of the office, but now better able to re-experience life in all its messy chaos. I try to keep everything constant and balanced, not too high, not too low, always pushing, but cool, not removed, but still more tightly wrapped than I would like to be. And most of the time this works fine."

Most of the time. This book is about those times outside of "most of the time" most of us know so well these days. I highly recommend this book.

[C · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somewhere between 3 and 4 stars for me. I'm torn on where to rate it, honestly.

I really really liked the first two sections. There's a great sense of a sort of toxic nostalgia and it is written so well and so subtly in many of the earlier stories. It's still present (maybe with a little more darkness) in the third section, but there is a lot of (I assume unintentionally) silliness in and around the flood stories even as they take you to that wholly darker place.

I think these stories are definitely worth a read if you're a fan of short fiction.

[Brian Alan Ellis · Rating 5 out of 5]

"...this omnibus (academic words!) of Tanzer’s short fiction is AMAZEBALLZ! Seriously killer, powerful, etc. etc. stuff. Like getting a totally sweet hand job from someone with an MFA—someone really smart, but also someone kinda shifty, kinda dangerous. Harkens back to the golden age of dirty realism, where Carver and A.M. Holmes and Gaitskill and Tobias Wolff were all your tightest bros."

Excerpt from yesclash.com

[Steve Karas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential Tanzer. Interesting seeing this prolific Chicago writer's work change and grow over a nine year stretch. And fun stopping for a pint of Yuengling at Thirsty's periodically along the way. I'm partial to After the Flood, the stories surrounding the storm of the century, and its tone, which I think differs from any of Tanzer's previous work.

[Al Kratz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Took me this long to read only because I was on a lot of vacations where I didn't have any down time to read. Writing a review of this for Alternating Current now.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the book. This...I have no words. So good. Go read it.

[Robert Vaughan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is terrific- review forthcoming. Suffice to say pick up a copy!

[Michael Van Kerckhove · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lesson in gut-punching through brevity. I particularly grooved on the third section, After the Flood, for its connection to a central event.

[Mike Keren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ben Tanzer proves himself to be a master wordsmith with this collection of interconnected short stories. While his main character is a sown and out, hypothetical city somewhere in central New York, the people who inhabit this city come to life under Tanzer's tutelage. As a psychologist I can only hope that I grasp my patients' selves with the clarity Tanzer displays.

I generally find that I don't enjoy short stories, but admiring Tanzer's wordsmith made this an enjoyable read. As a writer myself, I hope that someday I will rise to this level, until then I will read more of Tanzer.