Far From Brooklyn

Super America, Anne Panning

I picked up this story collection without any advance knowledge. Something about the first paragraph appealed to me:

My father picked me up from my college after my Acting II midterm.  He passed me a smoke.  It was spring break, which in Minneapolis meant old glacial dung clung to the curbs and sides of houses. Course, used snow lay scattered like margarita salt on the street. I was nineteen.

So, with the exception of the margarita salt, that’s a pretty fine paragraph.  It brought to mind Bobbie Anne Mason and Raymond Carver and some of the other “Dirty Realists” I was reading back in the early ‘80s.

And generally the stories lived up to that paragraph, the good and the bad.

I dunno, that’s about it…