SSCs in WaPo

Paul Zakrzewski reviews three short story collections for the Washington Post: Davy Rothbart’s The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas, Craig Davidson’s Rust and Bone, and my pal Tod Goldberg’s Simplify. Of Simplify, Zakrzewski says:

Goldberg’s best stories are told in retrospect, as if the narrators need psychic distance to fashion their memories in the most potent form. My favorite is “The Living End,” a haunting account of the summer of 1973, when the narrator’s older brother returns from Vietnam with strange scrapes and bruises; the story becomes a mystery that involves the abduction of a Native American girl across the street. This story has a stable nuclear family at its center — not stable enough, however, to stave off the enormous forces that conspire to destroy its children.

Read it all here.