Short People: Stories - Hardcover

Joshua Furst

3.77

100 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375414312 ISBN 13: 9780375414312

Publisher: Knopf, 2003

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An astonishing debut: ten stories that explore—and reveal—American childhood in all its glory, hope and conflict.
In Short People we encounter, among many others, Jason and Billy, best friends who discover by the age of six how to conquer the world, only to see this idyll then shatter before them; Shawn, whose baptism compels him to make life a holy hell for everyone around him; and Evan, who finds that his pursuit of a Boy Scout merit badge is luring him into uncharted social territory. In the meantime, an agonized couple exhausts their expectations for their own kids, with an aftermath that afflicts them all. There’s also Mary, whose sixteenth birthday precipitates an adulthood she is scarcely prepared to enter, and Emmy, who began that same transition when she was only twelve. Finally, and perhaps most harrowingly, is the nurse who with eerie prescience delivers so many babies to their destiny.

In a remarkable display of imagination and compassion, Joshua Furst reconstrues our preconceptions about innocence, purity, faith and memory through an unflinching, pitch-perfect gaze, with both authority and originality. Each new story enhances a collection whose importance is thoroughly contemporary and at once hilarious and heartbreaking.

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Review:

In his debut story collection, Short People, Joshua Furst presents a thoughtful, haunting look at the lives of children experiencing emotional and psychological growing pains. From a born-again son coming to grips with puberty ("[w]hy shouldn't he have looked at the Playboy the tough boys in the bathroom tried to force on him before they gave him a swirly?"), post-baptismal blues, and his parents' casual disregard of sin-free living, to a nerdy Boy Scout's public humility at camp and the sexual politics among high school girls, Furst follows kids as they try to find acceptance from their peers, as well as themselves. Interspersed are snippets of the weak, abused and neglected; children with succinct and poignant fates. While these interjections interrupt the pace, they are not superfluous, and Furst ties them together rather nicely.

While Furst occasionally breaks out of character and some of the children and families seem a bit too dysfunctional, issues perceived to be of critical importance--like TV watching in "The Good Parents"--captivate young minds:

It didn't matter what we were watching, the momentous thing was that we were watching, breaking the taboo--and without any negative psychological effects. No, TV was helping us. Though we wouldn't have been able to put it this way, we knew, we just knew that if we logged enough surreptitious hours, the massive assimilating force behind them would shove all our weirdness and eccentricities into a cellar where no one could see them. We'd put an end to the whispers, the jeers, the abrupt pointed silences.

Furst's Short People contains stories that linger on, and the playground down the street will never seem the same. --Michael Ferch

From the Back Cover:

“Startling . . . a thoughtful if disturbing portrait of what it means to be a child. Or, more to the point, what it means to be human.”
–Bernadette Murphy, Los Angeles Times

“Complex and compassionate . . . a literary and social force that challenges the preconceptions of what it is truly like to be a kid today.”
–Helen Ubinasi, The Hartford Courant

“Every story in this collection resonates . . . Tthis is a book that will stay with you for a long time.”
–Fort Worth Star-Telegram
"Short People is a remarkable collection of stories, a wide ranging, unsentimental exploration of the lost worlds of childhood and adolescence where the angles are all slightly askew and the logic is more rigorous than our own. These are scary, funny, brilliantly observed narratives; Josh Furst is a terrific writer. "
---Jay McInerney

"Joshua Furst writes about the world of young people with a complexity and lack of sentimentality that is rarely, if ever, explored in American literature. To read these stories is to enter into some dark worlds, but the magic here lies in Furst's affection for his characters and, moreover, his almost parental desire for them to turn out okay. Short People is, at its core, a book about caring, and no one has taken more care than the author himself."
--Meghan Daum, author of My Misspent Youth and The Quality of Life Report

"Joshua Furst's debut collection is a book about childhood, not war, yet it
has the feel of a letter from the front written to a soldier just graduating
from boot camp and dreading what's to come. Its message is heartbreakingly
mature: it doesn't matter what the conflict's about. Once the fighting has
started, you have no choice but to see it through."
--Dale Peck

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