Today’s book review comes to us from Kathryn Ordiway, who digs into Sara Lippmann’s JERKS, out last week from Mason Jar Press. “The women in Lippmann’s stories are wonderfully and quickly crafted,” Ordiway writes, “even when they are not the narrators or protagonists.” Read the rest of the review at the link below.
The desire that permeates the stories in Sara Lippmann’s Jerks is darkly, delightfully messy. What she renders best is the kind of desire that seems baseless. Why do I want the small random things that I do on a daily basis? I don’t know, simply because I do. And the characters here are much the same. They want, they ache, they reach for, they get, and it doesn’t really matter why they do any of this, it simply matters that they have.
The stories are peppered with guilty pleasures and unconventional hobbies—reality tv, making slime, giving complicated homemade gifts during the holiday season—which lends every story, no matter how quick or strange, a peppering of reality. Even when the stories veer from the domestic to the strange, these shots of the everyday provide firm ground for deviation.
