This Close: Stories

"Jessica Francis Kane’s second collection is filled with uncertain women adrift in an increasingly complicated world. Kane explores the anxieties and preoccupations of her characters with such empathy that you worry about them as you might about a troubled friend. She offers intimate insights into characters like spiky, exhausted, forlorn Mary Anne Leary, who appears in four stories, before and after the death of her son, and Elizabeth, who takes to her bed with depression. We know these people. We recognize their all-too-human flaws. They are our family, our friends and neighbors. They are us, at our most vulnerable."