Jamie Perez’s Reviews > Valparaiso, Round the Horn > Status Update

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.

It's cliché to say you love an author's voice, or to say anything about a fresh new voice, but whatever. This book is new and different or it's really old and in love with Mark Twain. It isn't much like whatever you are reading now. Maybe it's what you should be reading next.