The People I Know: Stories

This is an unusual book in the best way. The stories here are small works of art, extremely intelligent and elegantly crafted, but never pretentious or academic or self-reverential. They are odd, indiosyncratic, and sometimes disturbing. Yet at the same time they manage to express sympathy, reaffirmation, and even love. Nancy Zafris has a take on things that is one-of-a-kind, and once you see through her eyes it all feels absolutely right and true. Out of common material (her characters are marginal types mostly: young, old, failed or failing), she creates realities that shimmer on the page. The perspectives of her narrators are just a little askew, but they never compromise with the truth. And through them, Ms. Zafris illuminates with language that is simple, fresh, and surprising. George Eliot said prose should be a little brittle, "as most bright and clear things are." She might have been talking about this book. I read a lot of contemporary fiction. With its combination of state-of-the-art story-telling, humor, and heart, this is among the best around .

These stories read like the petals of a flower-come upon individually, scattered on the sidewalk or in a breeze, they tell of some unknown, casual violence, a tearing-apart- and, equally, of the unseen whole. Together, they become a thing of beauty, fragile and admirable- an evocation, in words, of places and moments that cannot be expressed in any less oblique fashion than longing and recollection. They are at once almost blindingly personal and philosophically universal, and will remain with you for a long time after you're done.