Best book of short stories I have read in years. The usual complaint about literary short stories is that they concern themselves with insignificant domestic issues and ignore the larger world--that however "fine" the writing, the content is trivial. And the most telling complaint about fiction that does address the large world issues is that it is boring. Well, here is a writer who can enter into any part of the Third World, however remote, however alien to our Western bourgeois life, and tell a story with dramatic power, in a language that is enviably concrete and vivid, with characters pulsating with life, with suspense in the movement of the action almost painfully intense, yet without any tricks of the trade. I have never before read such good writing applied to such a world-view. Whether it is Haiti, Thailand,Sierr Leone, Columbia-this is the familiar territory of human charcter, for better or worse.
