I really just felt like I was reading snippets from the same story over and over again. All the characters were so similar I had a hard time remembering if a story had ended or if I was still reading the same one. That said, there are one or two really interesting bits in here - the less narrative and shorter ones really showed her talent. As a whole though, this collection is lackluster and too unvaried to make a real impression. ( )

One professional reviewer assumes that the author's actual voice is fused to the first-person voices in these texts. That is, Rebecca Schiff is speaking these stories as if there are no created personas distant from the author.
On the contrary, I sense a significant gulf between the author and the created speakers in these stories. There are numerous spiritual references sprinkled throughout this interesting collection, and the narrators are deeply alienated from any sort of healthy theology of the body. There is no genuine love, no romantic sensuality, no emotional connection; there are certainly no echoes of Walt Whitman's singing of the body electric (where, "If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred") in these stories; instead, Schiff masterfully immerses us in the numb sterility of hookup culture.
I read these stories as cautionary landscapes (perhaps with the ecstatic Hasidic affirmation of love and family as silent contrasting context in the background?). For example, there is nothing titillating about the description of de-spiritualized sex in "Third Person," where we read, "she forgot all the sex she had as soon as she had it, she didn't really have it when she had it" (53). Similarly, in "Little Girl," the narrator describes the rapid-fire hookup lifestyle of a young woman responding to random male invitations. When she arrives, "Some of the buildings had elevators and she enjoyed the anticipation on the ride up, the soreness on the ride down. What happened in between almost didn't happen." And on the same page we learn that "[her] body acted the same no matter who touched her" (120).
Any comedy here is dark and nervous. These sexual encounters sound like the dissatisfying buzzes of addicts whose nerves are shot and they're ready to crumble. Most of the negative elements noted by some reviewers, in my view, are intentional and integral to Schiff's striking sketches of this emotionally blasted contemporary landscape. ( )

A concise collection of over twenty stories with vignettes about the lives of the young and dissolute. The author, Rebecca Schiff, writes from a very specific viewpoint. Some stories are told in a discombobulated stream of consciousness while others have a more traditional narrative, but all contain fairly brief and entertaining observations about sexuality and loss. ( )

Enjoyable at very many points. It's like Lydia Davis were a Jewish liberal arts graduate and downloaded Tinder. I mean this in a very good way. ( )