How many stories do you need to make a collection? In the case of Curtis Sittenfeld's Help Yourself, it's THREE. Not complaining about the quality, but a volume of well under a hundred pages has trouble qualifying as a book, in my opinion! This is the problem with buying sight unseen from Brotherhood Books -- of course I don't take note of the number of pages when I'm eagerly clicking Add to Basket.
Having said that, the stories themselves are excellent: wry, self-aware, slightly painful. In White Women LOL, a middle class woman makes some ill-judged remarks at a bar, and pays the price in community and self-judgment; Creative Differences ponders the trade-offs between commercialism, art, exposure and money. Show Don't Tell deliciously returns to one of Sittenfeld's favourite arenas, the world of students, this time creative writing students, but enlarges the horizon with the inclusion of a difficult housemate.
I devoured these stories in a single greedy gulp, but they've just left me hungry for more.
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