Wait Till You See Me Dance

January 23, 2017
The title story of this collection of 39 short, odd, funny, disturbing stories features a burned-out ESL instructor who drives her co-worker, the office assistant, to a dance. When the assistant falls down a well during a pit stop, the instructor threatens to abandon her if she doesn’t help one of the instructor’s students—a gifted musician whose English is terrible—receive a passing grade on his end-of-semester standardized test. The instructor interrupts her narrative three times to discuss It’s a Wonderful Life. In “Voltaire Night,” students from adult education evening classes compete at telling the worst thing that ever happened to them. Travel tales include “Stay Where You Are,” in which a lone rebel takes a tourist couple hostage, and “Welcome,” about a foreigner who has outstayed her welcome. Unferth’s (Minor Robberies) stories can be as short as one paragraph and often lack plot, names, or segues. One character is called simply “Vice President of Pretzels,” which is all that’s needed to understand that he won’t be any help to his customer. “37 Seconds” consists of a list of fleeting impressions that add up to a man and a woman having an argument. Both traditionally told stories like “Pet” and ingeniously structured pieces like “An Opera Season” and “Abandon Normal Instruments” showcase Unferth’s razor-sharp conversational prose and idiosyncratic blend of normal and weird, idealistic and disillusioned.

Starred review from January 1, 2017
A stunning debut collection from Unferth (Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, 2011, etc.), in which a maverick cast of lonely characters wades through life's uncertainties.Unferth, whose collection of short-short fiction, Minor Robberies (2007), was published by McSweeney's, re-emerges with 39 poignant, sharp-edged stories that cut right to the bone of the human psyche with precision and grace. The collection opens with the Pushcart Prize-winning "Likeable," a story ironically about a woman who is so "inconveniently unlikable...she will have to be shoved into a hole and left there." While this woman sadly capitulates to her fate, the rest of the books' inhabitants don't fold so willingly (at least not without a fight or the haphazard adoption of two turtles). They're disenchanted, mordantly obsessive, delusional, yet nevertheless utterly relatable in their indefatigable search for love and acceptance, each one quietly shouldering "the familiar slow-burn panic that you were doing nothing with your life, had not lived up to your 'potential, ' or, worse, you had and it changed nothing." In "Flaws," a couple's listless gossiping devolves into a gloves-off screaming match (succinctly encapsulated in one paragraph). In another story, a father, ignoring the glaring chasms in his family life, signs up for a prison mentoring program and becomes deeply invested in a one-sided relationship. Meanwhile, the title story's protagonist, a clairvoyant adjunct professor--who can predict how long someone has to live--arrives at a moral crossroads when she falls in love with her failing student. Prickly dilemmas, physical and existential, abound in these allegorical stories, each terrifically mundane and told with an exquisite restraint that drolly captures the inherent hope of humanity, or, "the sheer human stubbornness that causes those worse off...to grab hold and climb back into the world of the living, 'optimism, ' one might call it." Chock-full of emotional insight and comic verve, Unferth's beguiling stories are not to be missed.

COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 1, 2017
Unferth's (Revolution, 2011) forceful collection explores existential moments and assumptions. The 39 short stories and vignettes vary in voice, perspective, and setting. Voltaire Night portrays an alcoholic adjunct who lands a job teaching in an adult-education writing program. The final class ends with a night of drinking, during which the professor challenges the students to share the most traumatic thing that's happened in their lives, with the worst story deemed the winner. This soon becomes a tradition, despite the professor's growing unease, until the confessional competition is knocked off course. In Mr. Simmons Takes a Prisoner, a disaffected father and husband strikes up a one-sided connection with a female inmate as part of a prison-reform program. The brief but haunting A Crossroads captures the unexpected and fleeting contentment found within a small ranch house at the corner of a congested intersection. In Pets, a rescued turtle torments a harried single mother struggling to connect with her son. Unferth's tales expose life's underlying darkness, while offering hard-won moments of clarity that cut straight to the heart.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)