The Daily Rumpus
Get Overly Personal Emails
From Stephen Elliott
In a certain kind of story, characters reflect and explore the financial world outside their narrative. A population left destitute by the American Civil War, for example, found hope in 1867 when Horatio Alger published Ragged Dick, a myth promising that honesty and hard work could take you from the poverty of a bootblack to the slightly less soul-crushing poverty of the lower-middle class.
...more
Stuart Nadler’s debut collection, The Book of Life, has been aptly compared to Bernard Malamud’s work. Like Malamud, Nadler crafts stories that are straightforward, classic and unsparing—and these stories explore tradition, faith, work and the strains of love and family.
...more
A descendant of Cheever, Stuart Nadler traces evolving relationships with delicate, precise prose in his debut short story collection, The Book of Life.