Songs of Vagabonds, Misfits, and Sinners Book

I don't often have such visceral reactions to books as I did to Ken Wohlrob's collection of short stories, Songs of Vagabonds, Misfits, and Sinners. The stories made me laugh, choke, and feel sick from the smells of New York City in the worst of an August heat spell. The writing is that vivid, the depiction of the city that real: if the writing had been any less brilliant, it would have been too painful to read.

I particularly loved two of the stories: "Job in Williamsburg," a story of a young artist as well as a story of what art means-and doesn't mean-in our time and place. The sounds of the people as well as the ambient New York noise was painfully perfect. And "The Look," the story of two people so not ready to parent their little girl across a divide of drugs, sex, and self-destructive living was excruciatingly sad, beautiful and matter-of-fact.

Wohlrob combines beauty, pain, despair, arrogance, irony, passion, innocence, cynicism, and longing into a medley of New York songs that is pitch-perfect and wonderful.

As soon as I recover from my first reading, I plan to read these stories again. And again. And again.