Funny Once: Stories

Graced with credible characters whose friendships, marriages, progeny, and divorces feel familiar and lived in, Nelson's supple stories have appeared in prestigious magazines and prize anthologies for two decades. This seventh short story collection (her tenth book of fiction) will delight longtime fans while likely propelling new readers to explore her earlier work. Even readers who have already encountered some of these newer stories in the pages of The New Yorker will find themselves fully engaged once again from the tumbling out of the first sentence on the first page. The narratives are driven by characters whose crises and moments of insight take the reader by surprise, but Nelson herself is completely in control of her complex tales, in which infidelities are exposed or never quite happen and old friends surprise one another with new revelations that take 20 pages to unfold. Even the peripheral characters, such as the acerbic, misplaced writing instructor for an adult education class in Kansas in the novella-length closing story, "Three Wishes," are presented as questions that might be answered in stories still to come.