A reflective short story collection follows friendships, families, loves, and losses across decades, exploring how memory reshapes the people and experiences that continue to matter in old age.
Ivan Prashker’s FEEL WANT, TASTE GRIEF, NEED FRIENDS, tells stories about people who remain in our lives even after relationships end, neighborhoods change, or loss leaves us with only memories. Set mostly in twentieth-century New York, these tales follow an aging narrator reflecting on friendship, Jewish identity, family, prejudice, regrets, and the unsettling reality that love often belongs to people who deserve it.
Prashker excels at portraying imperfect individuals, resisting the urge to clean up their flaws for the sake of emotional impact. For example, “Your Kansas Friend” depicts a friendship forming between two Army buddies, even as deep-seated prejudices come to light. “The Cold War That Never Ended” explores the complex bond between a son and his father, the latter having both saved and harmed the former. “The Gangster” delves further into moral ambiguity, presenting a criminal capable of both cruelty and unexpected compassion. These characters linger in the reader’s memory because Prashker allows affection, resentment, loyalty, and disappointment to exist side by side.
The collection maintains its effectiveness even when the stakes are smaller. Everyday occurrences like a misbehaving beagle, a batch of old letters, a birthday celebration, or an ordinary phone call can carry surprising emotional weight. In one passage, memories lead someone back to “another city, another country, another world, another time.” Prashker’s conversational, often blunt tone prevents these moments from becoming overly sentimental. Meanwhile, humor offers needed relief in stories marked by Holocaust trauma, illness, aging, and mortality.
As FEEL WANT, TASTE GRIEF, NEED FRIENDS progresses, these stories start to resonate with each other and the emotional impact deepens. Friends, family, pets, old romances, and even everyday items come back into focus, each time gaining additional significance. By late in the collection, an image as simple as the narrator “squeezing the phone as if I was hugging her” carries the weight of decades.
Prashker’s attention to detail brings depth to the collection. Mentioning baseball players, restaurants, meals, books, neighborhoods, and personal histories helps build a vibrant world and makes the memories feel genuine. While these details sometimes make the narrative slower, they emphasize the narrator’s desire to safeguard the people and places that influenced him. The best stories achieve a balance between rich description and strong emotional focus on the characters.
Ivan Prashker’s FEEL WANT, TASTE GRIEF, NEED FRIENDS offers a heartfelt depiction of friendship and aging by blending humor, moral complexity, and an intimate sense of remembrance.
Source: IndieReader
