Pure Hollywood

November 1, 2017

A National Book Award finalist for Florida and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for All Souls, Schutt is also a two-time winner of the O. Henry Prize, and the characters in these love-hurts stories range from a young mother who rejects her child with tragic consequences to a widowed actress succumbing to alcohol while living alone in the desert. Expect elegant, chiseled language; a big boost at PLA and ALA.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2017

O. Henry Prize winner Schutt's collection includes a novella and ten stories that examine the dark side of the human psyche with surgical precision. From the Hollywood trophy wife grappling with her late husband's demise to the woman from Connecticut who contemplates her journey from optimistic youth to discontented middle age to the neglectful couple whose toddler suffers the consequences of their inattention, these stories offer brief and sometimes brutal vignettes from the lives of ordinary people. Schutt's prose is sparse and poetic, offering an intimate glimpse, a taste, a tease, a miniature window into the life of each character. Love, negligence, irresponsibility, accident, and obsession combine with loss to make each story an event readers will remember vividly. VERDICT This book will appeal to short story fans, especially those who enjoy the writing styles of J.D. Salinger and Katherine Mansfield. [See Prepub Alert, 10/5/17.]--Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of RhodeIsland Libs., ProvidenceReestablishing family ties; the second title in a seasonal quartet; a must for lovers of theater

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 15, 2018
Ten stories and a novella that give us oblique glimpses of tragedy.Schutt's (Prosperous Friends, 2012, etc.) distinct and economic style is on full display throughout this slim collection. She makes use of parentheticals frequently. In "The Duchess of Albany," the main character recalls her late husband's old age in an off-camera, single-sentence scene: "(Owen at the long table, saying to the ringing phone, 'Go away, people. Leave us alone, ' and people pretty much did)." Schutt offers surprising reminders of the ghastly and gruesome that are never too far away. The second and penultimate stories, "The Hedges" and "Oh, the Obvious," feature accidents that occur on vacations. In each, the narrative perspective makes the reader essentially a bystander witnessing terrible, even fatal, events that befall a stranger. In "Where You Live, When You Need Me?" a mother recounts the summer when Ella, a much-needed babysitter, appeared out of nowhere. "Everyone shared Ella. She had work every day if she wanted." Nobody ever even knew Ella's last name, and this was no innocent time of naivete. Indeed, this was 1984, "the summer when little parts of little bodies turned up in KFC buckets in Dumpsters in the city." The title piece, the novella, layers the tragedy. We open on a California wildfire and then meet Mimi, a young, recent widow of a famous comedian who was four decades her senior. We see Mimi relive her own troubled childhood before she becomes an unintentional witness to another family's tragedy. Through this, the novella--like the collection--maintains a dark wit that keeps it buoyant. In a tense conversation with her late husband's son, Mimi is asked, "What did you and my dad ever have in common?" She answers with the perfect punch line, "He didn't really like his kids and neither do I."Intimate portrayals of darkness told in Schutt's tight and affecting prose.

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January 1, 2018
Schutt's (All Souls, 2008) short stories portray flawed characters wrestling with resentment, loneliness, and mortality. The titular story follows colorful Mimi after the death of her much older comedian husband. Left with no inheritance, she is forced out of their Los Angeles home, prompting her to set out to find her childhood abode, assailed by haunting memories of her and her brother's past. Tactile elements generate an anxious sense of dilapidation and internal confrontation. The accompanying 10 tales, varied in length, feature pairingshusband and wife, parent and child, siblingsas they navigate landscapes both familiar and unsettling. The Hedges carries an uneasy sense of premonition as a couple vacations at a posh resort with their young son. In The Duchess of Albany, an aging mother grapples with her twin daughters while struggling with addiction and loss. The brief, punchy The Dot Sisters finds two sisters freed from familial strife yet hovering at an existential precipice. Schutt's restrained, provoking tales hold detailed impressions at arm's length, as it were, leaving readers to explore life's uneasy truths viewed through an unrelenting lens.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)