You Are Not A Stranger Here

So my friend Cornelius Blackpool suggested a collection of short stories to me. "It's called 'You Are Not A Stranger Here' by Adam Haslett," he said. "It's fucking awesome."

Blackpool has always seemed a damn smart guy, having majored in Literature and went on to work in the Hedge Fund world.

Anyhow, Elle bought me the book from the Strand last week. I finished the book i three days of subway rides. Besides the ones where Elle and I meet on the back of the train on our ways home from work, they were the best subway rides of my life.

Haslett graduated from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and from Yale Law School. It's the only thing he has ever published, and it was a finalist for the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. And for good reason, too. His stories are definitely MFA fiction, but the best kind. Critics have called the stories Checkhovian. I guess that's fair.

Here is the first story from the collection:

"Notes For My Biographer"

Two things to get straight from the beginning: I hate doctors and have never joined a support group in my life. At seventy-three, I'm not about to change. The mental-health establishment can go screw itself on a barren hilltop in the rain before I touch their snake oil or listen to the visionless chatter of men half my age. I have shot Germans in the fields of Normandy, filed twenty-six patents, married three women, survived them all, and am currently the subject of an investigation by the IRS, which has about as much chance of collecting from me as Shylock did of getting his pound of flesh. Bureaucracies have trouble thinking clearly. I, on the other hand, am perfectly lucid.

You can read the rest here:

www.all-story.com/issues.cgi?action=show_story&story_id=46