Days: Stories

The population of Mary Robison's fiction is the stunned citizenry of a world vaporized beneath them, people who say all right and okay often, not because they consent, but because nothing counts. Still, there are chronicles of small victories here, small only because, as Robison so precisely documents, larger victories are impossible.

There is an almost incredible purity of line and texture in these stories. Every phrase is lucid, every character comes alive, and every sentence suggested a calm, wise, heartbroken version of the world. Robison writes like an avenging angel, and I think she may be a genius. --Richard Yates, author of Cold Spring Harbor