This Close: Stories

Product Description

This Close, a graceful, moving new collection by the author of The Report
*An NPR and Flavorwire Best Book of the Year *
How close can we come to love, success, happiness, forgiveness?
An older woman, irritated with her wealthy young neighbor’s yard “improvements,” offers a corner of her lawn to a Croatian immigrant who wants a vegetable garden. A recent college graduate living in New York City finds himself in a strangely entangled friendship with his dry cleaner and her son. A daughter accompanies her father to Israel, where, seeing a new side of him away from her mother, she makes an unusual bargain.
Through thirteen stories, some stand-alone, others woven with linked characters, Kane questions the tensions between friendship and neighborliness, home and travel, family and ambition. In writing filled with wit and humor and incredible poignancy, she deftly reveals the everyday patterns that, over time, can swerve a life off course.

From Booklist

In the 12 stories collected here, Kane once again reminds readers of her ability to observe life’s finer details while keeping a sharp eye on the big picture. In Lucky Boy, a newcomer to New York City develops an unusual relationship with his dry cleaner while learning to navigate life in the Big Apple. Two neighbors in American Lawn share a garden plot while competing for the attentions of a local farmer. A mother and her young son ponder their respective pasts and futures while selling their possessions at a garage sale in First Sale. Lesson places this same duo behind the wheel of a moving car several years later, providing a snapshot of their changing relationship. Readers of Kane’s well-received debut novel, The Report (2010), will recognize her steady hand and welcome another opportunity to experience her carefully crafted work. Intriguing, delicate, graceful, and deeply moving, this is a collection to be read and pondered over. It will draw readers into worlds both foreign and familiar while turning the everyday into something extraordinary. –Carol Gladstein

Review

“Kane explores the anxieties and preoccupations of her characters with such empathy that you worry about them as you might about a troubled friend. . . . We know these people. We recognize their all-too-human flaws. They are our family, our friends and neighbors. They are us, at our most vulnerable.” ―Jane Ciabattari, NPR, “Best Books of 2013”
“This Close serves up quietly nervy stories of everyday life subject to swift psychological rifts.” ―ELLE
“How close can we come to achieving love, success, and forgiveness? . . . You’ll be thinking about how your life parallels the story plots long after you’ve finished reading.” ―Marie Claire
“Quiet and clear, Kane’s stories eschew the flashy for the profound.” ―The Washington Post
“The stories in Jessica Francis Kane’s This Close are full of wisdom and light. Her characters felt as intimate and real to me as life. Her prose is so generous and knowing it shimmers. I’ll return to this beautiful book again and again.” ―Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things
“Kane shows such tenderness toward these spiky, exhausted, forlorn, uncertain people that she allows us to sympathize with their all-too-human flaws. We know these people. They are our family, our friends and neighbors. They are us, at our most vulnerable.” ―NPR
“[Kane’s] characters are grappling with the tension between how they expected life to be as opposed to how it’s actually turning out. The final and best story, ‘Local Birds,’ could be slipped into James Salter’s collection Dusk without raising much suspicion: both writers share the ability to render an incredible amount of resonance from the merest of human incidents.” ―The Daily Beast
“Smart, subtly heartbreaking. . . . This Close is about the way that people evolve over time; the numerous faces any individual wears over the course of his or her life, and the near-impossibility of truly knowing anyone on account of