If you’ve read Tolstaya before, you’d recognize that she’s primarily a short story writer. And this book more or less suggests why. Like a lot of writers who write short stories as their main form, she plays around a lot with what to do with longer fiction, and this book was completed over the course of 14 years. There’s many other writers, Donald Barthleme comes to mind, Ann Beattie, Lorrie Moore, whose long fiction feels like the departure from the short fiction and not the […]