(Insta: Candace Reads Books) 

I believe Season of Stories sent out a sample of this? And that’s where I discovered it? I wish Penguin Random House would bring it back! Each day you got a snippet of a short story in your email, it was like Christmas morning every morning. ?

What’s It All About? 

 A passive-aggressive couple in the midst of a divorce compete over whose new fling is more exotic. A Russian migrant in Tokyo agonizes over the money her lover accepts from a yakuza. A dead body on a drug dealer’s floor leads to the strangest first date ever.
In this razor-sharp debut collection, Jen Silverman delivers 11 interconnected stories that take place in expat bars, artist colonies, train stations, and matchbox apartments in the United States and Japan. Unforgettable characters crisscross through these transient spaces, loving, hurting, and leaving each other as they experience the loneliness and dangerous freedom that comes with being an outsider. In “Maria of the Grapes”, a pair of damaged runaways get lost in the seductive underworld beneath Tokyo’s clean streets; in “Pretoria”, a South African expatriate longs for the chaos of her homeland as she contemplates a marriage proposal; in “Girl Canadian Shipwreck”, a young woman in Brooklyn seeks permission to flee from her boyfriend and his terrible performance art; in “Maureen”, an aspiring writer realizes that her beautiful, neurotic boss is lonelier than she lets on.

Amazon: