The The Missing Kidney and other stories: And Other Stories

by Maxine Rosaler

Overview

Set in the vanished world of the New York City of the 1970s and ‘80s, these stories convey a sense of the enchantment that lurks on the flip side of every moment, as if the meaning of life were hidden within the static being blasted out of the loudspeakers on a subway platform, or a scrap of newspaper preserved under ice on a cold winter’s day.

A girl tries to save the boy she loves from his crippling love for his uncle.  A champion of social justice talks herself into believing that the man she finds sexually repulsive is a perfect fit for her perfectly ordered life. A man kneels on the sidewalk before a memorial he constructed for his girlfriend as a crowd of curious onlookers gather around him. Rosaler deals out the fates of a vivid array of complex characters with unflagging energy, wit and a delight in the details of city life.  

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781953002556
Publisher:	Delphinium Books, Incorporated
Publication date:	05/13/2025
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Maxine Rosaler’s novel Queen for a Day was nominated for The Kirkus Prize. The Jewish Book Council chose it to be one of ten fiction books included in its 2021 list of recommended books. She is a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction Fellowship. Stories of hers have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Tikkun, The Southern Review, Glimmer Train, Witness, Fifth Wednesday, storySouth, Green Mountains Review, and other literary magazines and cited in editions of Best American Short Stories and Best American Nonfiction. One was a finalist for the Nelson Algren Awards.

Editorial Reviews

An engrossing and compassionate collection showing motherhood in its most unrelenting form.”—Kirkus Reviews(starred)

“Maxine Rosaler’s stories are both hard-edged and comic, both laced with despair and hopeful against all expectation. New York City is the setting, a struggle to prosper in the face of bad choices and deeply ingrained perversity is the theme. Constant, however, is a narrative voice that proves irresistible, and a craftsman’s approach to the construction of these contemporary parables.”—C. Michael Curtis, Fiction Editor, The Atlantic

“Rosaler writes of Mimi’s ongoing struggle from firsthand experience and instills in her protagonist such fierce resolve to do all she can for her son while simultaneously limning awkward episodes with ironic humor; the reader becomes immersed in all that the diagnosis of autism in one’s child must entail.”—Booklist

From the Publisher

★ 2025-03-08
Fourteen stories about the things we do for love, set in New York of the 1970s and ’80s.

Though her debut novel-in-stories,Queen for a Day (2018), was well reviewed, Rosaler’s work will probably be new to most readers. Yet fans of Lorrie Moore, Lucia Berlin, Marian Thurm, and Grace Paley will quickly notice that those authors have a sister in this whimsical and wise chronicle of relationships between the sexes. In "Hospitality," a young woman who is about to become entangled with a much older and somewhat tedious man explains her situation: “My life, like a bagel, had no center.” Another character, in "Happiness," is a dancer in the East Village, “whose face often wore a faraway smile that seemed to say she was sharing a private joke with God.” In the title story, our hapless heroine can’t seem to nail her job search: “Once, I was so flustered, I forgot to put paper in the typewriter, and I typed my thirty-five words a minute onto a bewildered, endlessly revolving black cylinder.” The typewriter, the pink pad hanging next to the fridge for messages, and the lack of cellphones mark these stories with period ambience, but the situations they illuminate are timeless. In a favorite, “Wheatberries,” the narrator comes home to find her husband has broken and thrown away a storage jar. “Reaching into the garbage, I retrieved the remnants of the jar and dumped what was left of the wheatberries onto the table, prepared to get to work salvaging as many pieces of grain as possible, because, in my own little way, I have always been a defender of the defenseless, a champion of lost causes, determined to set every wrong right.” When the husband comes in and tells her she’s insane, she says, “Sometimes I think you don’t love me anymore.” Oh no, he counters, “I love you. I love you. Just because I hate you doesn’t mean I don’t love you. Let’s just forget it.” That’s marriage for you, right? Chef’s kiss, as they say nowadays.

The best short story writer you’ve never heard of.

Kirkus Reviews