Bummer: And Other Stories

A clever and engaging collection of “darkly funny, sexy, and very smart” stories about women on the brink of disaster—and the edge of grace (Tom Perrotta).

The women featured in these stories have one thing in common: They’re all having a terrible day. There’s the housewife so entranced by the pristine order of her neighbor’s belongings that she can’t stop herself from breaking into their home. There’s the mother easing her young son through the trauma of a murder, suddenly confronted with the reappearance of his father. There’s the middle-aged woman stuck in a coffee-chain job alongside snotty college kids, the talent manager supervising a corral of misguided young stars, and the spiky-haired artist who literally dumps her slacker fiance—from a moving car—before engaging in an ill-advised fling in Vegas.

Janice Shapiro has created a cast of utterly distinct outsiders, yet her earthy warmth and asymmetrical humor ring through them all. Her gift for pitch-perfect dialogue—along with her instinctual ease in writing about such fraught topics as commercial sex, death, and the everyday tragedies of growing older—makes her voice one to be relished: tough-minded, sardonic, intimate, and free.