This Close: Stories

Name: This Close: Stories
Author: Jessica Francis Kane
ISBN: 9781555976361

by Jessica Francis Kane

This Close, a graceful, moving new collection by the author of The Report An NPR and Flavorwire Best Book of the Year How close can we come to love, success, happiness, forgiveness? An older woman, irritated with her wealthy young neighbor's yard "improvements," offers a corner of her lawn to a Croatian immigrant who wants a vegetable garden. A recent college graduate living in New York City finds himself in a strangely entangled friendship with his dry cleaner and her son. A daughter accompanies her father to Israel, where, seeing a new side of him away from her mother, she makes an unusual bargain. Through thirteen stories, some stand-alone, others woven with linked characters, Kane questions the tensions between friendship and neighborliness, home and travel, family and ambition.…

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NPR Books We Love

"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."

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