Status Updates From Valparaiso, Round the Horn

Just finished the story "Private Fight" which is a perfect embodiment of all that is great about this book. One way to break down literature / art is that there is work that makes the normal strange (Gertrude Stein) and work that makes the strange normal (Tim O'Brien)... What is amazing is how this book is how deftly she crosses from one side of that divide to the other.

Good short stories take a lot out of you, and these are really good. I think I only have it in me to read one solid book of them a year, and I'm glad this is the book of them I'm reading this year. The characters, the settings, everything sprawls and nothing is repeated. All characterization. All lives heading toward change.