For a great while I’ve been away from reading short stories of real length—instead flipping back through Etgar Keret’s The Nimrod Flipout for three-page jolts of inspiration. But when I read Tower’s “Retreat” at a cafe in Brooklyn, I couldn’t stop nudging my date, telling her, “Listen to this sentence!” It was cracking me up, in a way that I’d become convinced that only George Saunders could do. Books like Tower’s don’t come around often—and not so secretly anymore: of course I love that its a short fiction collection debut in a world where publishers insist short fiction doesn’t sell.
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