An Amateur's Guide to the Night

A collection of thirteen short stories reflects on the life of disaffected youth and speculates on how they manage to remain courteous and deferent towards the rest of society

The writing is cool and detached, controlling a breathtaking compassion. Her subjects and characters, mostly family members, are right out of life. An Amateur's Guide to the Night continues Robison's practice of penetrating the heart. There is not one story in this collection that does not evoke an emotional response. . . It's an intimate, enriching experience. --San Francisco Chronicle

These thirteen stories are glimpses from a moving train into lit parlors, dinettes, bedrooms and dens. Though the rider sees only fragments, he can intuit essentials from posture, from motion, and see the space that characters inhabit. Think of Robison as the engineer, blowing the whistle, calling the stops and starts; invisible when you want to ask her why we're stalled here in the middle of nowhere, between stations, jobs, relationships and decisions. Like Ann Beattie, Robison shunts the reader off the mainline to a limbo where everyone waits for something to begin or end. As narrative, the stories are inconclusive; as commentaries on the way Americans live now, they're absolute and final. --Los Angeles Times