Some of Her Friends That Year: New and Selected St

Maxine Chernoff’s spry, well-crafted stories illuminate the funny and disquieting subtleties of urban couples and families.

Highly regarded for her deft and humorous portrayals of the dark side of modern living, Maxine Chernoff’s latest collection is a droll, poetic field guide to the amusing, baffling, and endearing behavioral patterns of the urban human being. Chernoff fans will relish the new stories, and new readers will discover a wonderful assemblage of Chernoff’s likeable, unaffected, and contemplative characters. With the precision of a poet and the astuteness of a sociologist, Chernoff continues to establish herself as a master of the short story genre with this excellent collection.

Maxine Chernoff has published six books of fiction and eleven books of poetry. Her books with Coffee House Press are Bop (1986); American Heaven (1996); and Some of Her Friends That Year: New and Selected Stories (2002). The latter two books were nominated for the Bay Area Book Award. Her first book of stories, Bop, was reprinted in the Vintage Contemporary Fiction Series. With Paul Hoover, she received the 2009 PEN Translation Award for The Selected Poems of Friedrich Hoelderlin (Omnidawn Press). She coedits the long-running literary journal New American Writing and chairs the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University. She has read and taught writing in many countries including England, Belgium, Scotland, Australia, Russia, China, the Czech Republic, Brazil, and Kenya.