The People I Know: Stories

By Nancy Zafris

Book Overview

The People I Know is a collection of nine stories, told by characters who hover at the edge of life. Whether it's Lorne, perched on a sofa as a wedding party swirls around him, or the elderly Mrs. R of "Morning at the Beach," imagining a career in crime as she sits on the front porch of a Miami hotel, these are people oddly accustomed to the sidelines of their worlds.

Nancy Zafris's characters do not so much hurdle their barriers as contemplate them with varying degrees of humor, regret, and fanciful expectation. Gazing out of his window at a horizon of crushed cars, Bonner Junior fantasizes about working at an I.M. Pei office building instead of at John Bonner and Son Metal Shredders; at the same time, his job allows him to amuse his friends with grisly, embellished stories of human shreddings and wild dogs. In "Meeting in Tokyo," a businessman examines his own attraction and aversion to conformity after taking a young secretary to a "love hotel." For Wendy, born with a strong nose and a Baltic name, cosmetic surgery has brought acceptance but also boredom. Suffering little "deaths of feeling" with each success, she flirts with disaster, with anything that will make her heartbeat "go up to 75 or more." Grace, in "Grace's Reply," prefers to deal with reality through illusion; she blames her son's death on a Navy intelligence operation and sends Pampers to an imaginary grandson.

Ranging from the kiddie bleachers of television's "Uncle Sylvester Show" to the upholstered seats of a Tokyo coffee shop, from a Navy recruitment office to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, these stories enliven the common places of our world. Sad, yet rarely defeated, Nancy Zafris's characters toe the line and sometimes manage to cross it.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0820334200
• ISBN13: 9780820334202
• Release Date: October 2009
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Simple, fresh, and surprising

This is an unusual book in the best way. The stories here are small works of art, extremely intelligent and elegantly crafted, but never pretentious or academic or self-reverential. They are odd, indiosyncratic, and sometimes disturbing. Yet at the same time they manage to express sympathy, reaffirmation, and even love. Nancy Zafris has a take on things that is one-of-a-kind, and once you see through her eyes it all feels absolutely right and true. Out of common material (her characters are marginal types mostly: young, old, failed or failing), she creates realities that shimmer on the page. The perspectives of her narrators are just a little askew, but they never compromise with the truth. And through them, Ms. Zafris illuminates with language that is simple, fresh, and surprising. George Eliot said prose should be a little brittle, "as most bright and clear things are." She might have been talking about this book. I read a lot of contemporary fiction. With its combination of state-of-the-art story-telling, humor, and heart, this is among the best around .

A delicate and subtle exploration of belonging.

These stories read like the petals of a flower-come upon individually, scattered on the sidewalk or in a breeze, they tell of some unknown, casual violence, a tearing-apart- and, equally, of the unseen whole. Together, they become a thing of beauty, fragile and admirable- an evocation, in words, of places and moments that cannot be expressed in any less oblique fashion than longing and recollection. They are at once almost blindingly personal and philosophically universal, and will remain with you for a long time after you're done.