“A collection of stories of faith and mortality that packs a wallop when experienced as a whole.”
Prashker’s collection of short stories explores love, loss, and growth.
Short stories are ephemeral by nature; by the time a reader finishes a collection, only a select few entries are likely to stay with them. But the recurring character details Prashker includes across his stories create a strong narrative through-line that rewards attentive readers and lends the collection an emotional weight that lingers after the last page. The book shares many of the themes that animate the author’s previous collection, Hazardous Pay, Shirt Talk and Twenty-Four Other Stories (2024), such as the evolution of familial relationships across time, and carries over many of the same characters, including protagonist Eric and his sisters, Sandra and Arlene. These unifying elements transform a loosely-connected series of vignettes into a moving tribute to the personal relationships we gain and lose over the courses of our lives. The work’s scope is established early on with cryptic asides like, “Syl was prescient—sensed years before the rest of us just how lost Steve was. But that’s another story.” Prashker also peppers in details from his own life, such as a stint writing adventure stories for the publishing venture Magazine Management. Eric’s Jewish faith and the ways in which generational trauma manifests in unexpected ways (as seen in a conversation with a Holocaust survivor at a holiday barbecue in “July Fifth”) are prevailing concerns. As the collection progresses and the larger narrative begins to cohere, flourishes like the mob antics in stories like “The Script” and “The Gangster” feel more rote than refreshing. But when taken together, these stories create a pointillist memoir told through vivid and fleeting interactions. The result is a thoughtful ode to companionship and connection that readers won’t soon forget.
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