First published 2017
In the title story, a woman who calls herself a "rube" watches New York's avant-garde intellectuals with sharp eyes and sharper judgment. She sees through their pretensions while questioning her own place among them. Across these varied tales, Stafford moves from satirical portraits of intellectual life to the quiet struggles of a German doctor working in an American defense plant town during wartime. An eight-year-old Indian orphan named Jim Littlefield arrives barefoot from Missouri by train. A fat girl imagines herself as twins and cannot stop eating. In a hospital room thick with ether, a woman recovers from a near-fatal accident. An elderly invalid has lost all her verbs and can only cry "I her!" while her forty-eight-year-old parrot repeats nothing but "Just a minute." The stories span from the Virgin Islands to Germany, from Oklahoma to Maine, but each reveals the same sharp observation of human nature. Stafford writes with controlled precision, capturing both the grotesque and the tender moments that define her characters' lives.
Genres: short-stories, literary-fiction, american-fiction, 20th-century
Vibes: intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: outsider-perspective, unreliable-narrator
Setting: New York, Virgin Islands, Germany, Oklahoma, Maine
Period: Wartime
252 pages · Kindle Edition · Farrar, Straus and Giroux