Show Don’t Tell

In this compulsive collection of twelve witty stories, Sittenfeld shows why she’s as beloved for her short fiction as she is for her novels, as she conjures up characters so real that they seem like old friends.

In ‘The Patron Saints of Middle Age,’ a woman visits two friends she hasn’t seen since her divorce. In ‘A for Alone,’ a married artist embarks on a project intended to disprove the so-called Mike Pence Rule, which suggests that women and men can’t spend time alone together without lusting after each other. And in ‘Lost but Not Forgotten,’ Sittenfeld gives readers of her novel Prep a new window into the world of her beloved character Lee Fiora, decades later, when Lee attends an awkward school reunion.