Bummer: And Other Stories

by Janice Shapiro

Overview

A clever and engaging collection of “darkly funny, sexy, and very smart” stories about women on the brink of disaster—and the edge of grace (Tom Perrotta).

The women featured in these stories have one thing in common: They’re all having a terrible day. There’s the housewife so entranced by the pristine order of her neighbor’s belongings that she can’t stop herself from breaking into their home. There’s the mother easing her young son through the trauma of a murder, suddenly confronted with the reappearance of his father. There’s the middle-aged woman stuck in a coffee-chain job alongside snotty college kids, the talent manager supervising a corral of misguided young stars, and the spiky-haired artist who literally dumps her slacker fiance—from a moving car—before engaging in an ill-advised fling in Vegas.

Janice Shapiro has created a cast of utterly distinct outsiders, yet her earthy warmth and asymmetrical humor ring through them all. Her gift for pitch-perfect dialogue—along with her instinctual ease in writing about such fraught topics as commercial sex, death, and the everyday tragedies of growing older—makes her voice one to be relished: tough-minded, sardonic, intimate, and free.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781593762964
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	11/01/2010
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Janice Shapiro is the author of Bummer and Other Stories. Her stories and comics have been published in The North American Review, 52 Stories, The Santa Monica Review, Everyday Genius, and Real Pants, among others. Janice’s graphic essay on her childhood crush on John Lennon appears in the anthology Crush. She lives in Berkeley, California.

What People are Saying About This

Charles Baxter

"The breath of life flows through every one of Janice Shapiro's wonderful stories, and you can feel the heart beating very close to the surface. Bummer is terrifically smart, with a kind of comic energy that can swerve at any moment into eloquent brokenheartedness. I loved this book." --(Charles Baxter, author of The Feast of Love)

Tom Perrota

"Darkly funny, sexy, and very smart." --(Tom Perrota)

Victoria Patterson

"Janice Shapiro's Bummer is bold, brave, and bitingly clever. Defying stereotypes and easy characterizations, Shapiro's female characters are sharp, intelligent, rebellious, bighearted, stubborn, independent, and emotionally fraught all at once. Shapiro's keen ear for dialogue and her deep and appealing humor make this collection an undeniable pleasure to read." --(Victoria Patterson, author of Drift: Stories and This Vacant Paradise)

David Shields

"This amazingly gutsy, fully voiced book bears comparison with the best work of Antonya Nelson, Mary Gaitskill, Lydia Davis, Amy Hempel, and Lorrie Moore."--(David Shields, author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto)

Editorial Reviews

Shapiro's narrow debut collection starts off great but becomes unfortunately repetitive. The title story tracks a 21-year-old punk rocker carrying the child of a junkie she met at an underground rock show. They've decided to marry in Vegas, but when he gets cold feet, she finds comfort in the arms of a suave high-roller who, misunderstanding the situation, pays her for the pleasure. The story is solid and nicely balanced, but in subsequent stories, the narrators, all female, suffer from strikingly similar problems that boil down to being caught between good-girl hopes and bad-girl instincts. (For instance, in five of these 11 stories, the female narrator is mistaken for a prostitute or prostitutes herself.) The writing itself is generally strong (except in "Small," a tediously naughty take on Snow White) and has moments of beauty, as in the melancholic, restrained "Death and Disaster," where a grieving woman accidentally kills her neighbor's bird. Shapiro is clearly capable of writing about more than tragic punk princesses, and, hopefully, her next book will build on that promise. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Bummer

"The stories of Janice Shapiro’s debut collection, Bummer, are told in a voice so natural and earnest, in sentences that so resemble the searching way we speak, you may just forget you’re reading a book." —The Brooklyn Rail

"The attitude of these short fictions is as spiky as the green Mohawk coiffure worn by Alison, the narrator of the title story . . . These stories speak with a bold, distinctive voice indicative of intelligence and offbeat, cynical humor." —Boston Globe

"Shapiro’s agile voice, generous humor, and balance of the tragic and vulnerable keep potentially depressing or ludicrous moments from sliding into cheap melodrama or cheekiness . . . Shapiro refreshingly writes with a brisk voice that casually balances the preposterous and the mundane. Grounding these stories is the clarity of Shapiro’s vision of these women’s inner lives, the way fears and desires are entangled, the way motivations for action get thwarted by the safety of inaction." —Baltimore City Paper

“Janice Shapiro has a powerful narrative drive and a brilliant ear for dialogue. These stories are funny, wrenching, and always smart. Reading them is a rare pleasure.” —Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love

"Shapiro’s 11 stories offer engaging and clever portraits of characters dealing with life’s troubling side effects." —Booklist

“In the best of these stories, the women bravely gather up every scrap of ‘cockeyed dignity’ they have and forge ahead. They may know from the beginning that the house always wins, but they haven’t given up . . . [Bummer’s stories] are captivating in their unflinching portrayals of individuals confronting a largely hostile or indifferent world.” —The Rumpus

"Crisp, refreshing and affecting." —Kirkus (starred review)

"Darkly funny, sexy, and very smart." —Tom Perrotta

"This amazingly gutsy, fully voiced book bears comparison with the best work of Antonya Nelson, Mary Gaitskill, Lydia Davis, Amy Hempel, and Lorrie Moore." —David Shields, author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

"The breath of life flows through every one of Janice Shapiro's wonderful stories, and you can feel the heart beating very close to the surface. Bummer is terrifically smart, with a kind of comic energy that can swerve at any moment into eloquent brokenheartedness. I loved this book." —Charles Baxter, author of The Feast of Love

"Janice Shapiro’s Bummer is bold, brave, and bitingly clever. Defying stereotypes and easy characterizations, Shapiro's female characters are sharp, intelligent, rebellious, bighearted, stubborn, independent, and emotionally fraught all at once. Shapiro's keen ear for dialogue and her deep and appealing humor make this collection an undeniable pleasure to read." –Victoria Patterson, author of Drift: Stories and This Vacant Paradise

From the Publisher

In the best of these stories, the women bravely gather up every scrap of 'cockeyed dignity' they have and forge ahead. They may know from the beginning that the house always wins, but they haven't given up . . . [Bummer's stories] are captivating in their unflinching portrayals of individuals confronting a largely hostile or indifferent world.

The Rumpus

Shapiro's 11 stories offer engaging and clever portraits of characters dealing with life's troubling side effects.

Booklist

As you can tell by the title, bad things happen to the characters in this collection of stories—but somehow they cope.

The title story begins "Man, I was having a bad day," and this mantra summarizes the life of many of the women Shapiro focuses on. Here 21-year-old pregnant Alison plans a Vegas wedding with boyfriend Sean, but he only agrees to it if they can have a Fear and Loathing theme. They drive across the desert in a rented Eldorado with Sean so strung out he doesn't know what he's doing. Alison instead has a one-night stand with someone (Jose? Ramon? She's not sure...), has beginner's luck at the blackjack table and finally reaches a reconciliation with Sean. Several of the stories are set in the recent past and reflect the anxieties of those times. In "1966," a girl and her sister pick up on their father's cues that he might put a pool in their backyard, but ultimately (and painfully) they realize this is just a fantasy—perhaps a good thing, for the young narrator is irrationally apprehensive in this summer of Richard Speck's murder of nurses and of students being shot from a tower at the University of Texas. In "Night and Day," a 40-ish talent agent sleeps with some of the younger actors she represents and poignantly reminisces about her gay mentor Leon, who had drowned seven years earlier. In "Tiger Beat," narrator Lita surprises herself by taking up with a struggling banana farmer in California and finds "There were dry spells, times I considered lowering my standards only to realize I had none." The only story that doesn't work is a sex-and-drug fantasy based on the seven dwarfs. Page, the narrator, has a tumble with all the dwarfs that will have her, but intense emotional pressures break up the group—and Grumpy eventually becomes a mortgage banker.

Shapiro's writing is crisp, refreshing and affecting—highly recommended.

Kirkus Reviews