Released today from Sundress Publications, Robert Long Foreman’s collection, I Am Here to Make Friends, depicts a “vibrant, often hilarious world” through stories which “derive much of their energy from a dark comedy and matter-of-fact renderings of the extraordinary,” according to our reviewer, Nicole VanderLinden.
I recently read an interview with Alice McDermott (in the Paris Review’s “Art of Fiction” No. 244) in which she advised writers to “be sure your stories aren’t too much about what they’re about.” I thought of this quote often while reading the nine fabulous stories in Robert Long Foreman’s I Am Here to Make Friends, in which narrators approach their interior stories from an angle, often a bizarre one, and in which their deadpan engagement in a madcap world underscores their own “thwarted longing,” as writer Maureen Stanton has described it, as much as it reveals the underbelly of life’s absurdities.
