Short People: Stories [Hardcover]

Joshua Furst (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 3, 2003

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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 Publishers Weekly

Like medical case histories put through a mangle, Furst's 10 stories are detached, distorted chronicles of the vicissitudes of childhood. Often narrated from an obtuse angle-first-person singular, future tense; first-person plural, present tense-they seem to freeze their subjects in place, stripping them of their defenses. Furst turns the literal-mindedness of childhood into a stylistic quirk, with decidedly mixed results. This tactic is on full display in "The Age of Exploration," in which two six-year-old boys while away a summer day. Any echoes of Bradbury's Dandelion Wine are soon dispelled by the plodding earnestness of the prose: "Billy would deny it, but he wishes he were as silly as Jason. Life can't be all books. You have to go out and play sometimes." Few children do play in Furst's stories, and when they do, their games turn into painful Darwinian struggles. In "Merit Badge," Evan finds himself on the wrong side of the adolescent divide at Boy Scout camp, when a treacherous friend lures him into a humiliating act and then exposes him to general ridicule. Black comedy takes center stage in "Red Lobster" when a deadbeat dad buys his kids dinner, and one of his sons takes his edict to clean his plate a bit too literally. Brief vignettes between stories give the collection extra structure. Their provenance is cleverly explained in the second-to-last story, "Failure to Thrive," in which a maternity ward nurse writes reports fantasizing about the futures of the premature infants in her charge-and decides to save them from their cruel fates, with tragic results. This is an ambitious debut, but Furst is at his best when he abandons his prosy experimentation with voice and perspective and tunnels directly into the unpretty minds of his young protagonists.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (June 3, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375414312
• ISBN-13: 978-0375414312
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,744,668 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars A window into the near past, April 29, 2006

By 

Barto "Bart" (United States, via everywhere else) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Short People: Stories (Hardcover)

This book is very good. That is a simple statement, so I will elaborate. I went to my college bookstore, and there was a wall of $1 books; I bought five of them, and this was one. I probably would have never read it, or even have heard of it, but that is one of the beauties of reading. Sometimes it isn't that you find a book, the book finds you. This is a hauntingly realistic look at childhood. How easy is it to forget our own cognisence at this age? We never thought of ourselves as immature mirrors of popular culture and Sesame Street, no, we were thinking, feeling, dissecting beings that absorbed everything around us. I am graduating here in 3 weeks, and I might have found this book especially poignant because of this, but it offers to the reader a significant, and memorable recreation of childhood. As St. Petersburg was Peter the Great's window to the west, this is my window to my own childhood. It doesn't only tell us the story of a few children, but reminds us of our own thought processes during the time. A thing that I had all but forgotten. It is funny at times, and terrifying at times; there are things that kids see and experience that should never have happened, but they do. This puts "childhood" into perspective. After all, we were not kids, on the periphery, we were -- short people. Experiencing, learning and living. I hope I am not being to ephemeral, but the one last not to make is: this book needed to be written. To remember childhood, one need not be a child, but reminisce on childood and the wonders contained within.

A very absorbing read...

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a smart, sophisticated collection, June 27, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Short People: Stories (Hardcover)

These aren't your ordinary stories. The author doesn't pander to the audience and the result is a book that is unlike anything I've ever read. The writing is, simply, excellent. I await more from this author.

2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Step into a new dimension, August 27, 2003

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Short People: Stories (Hardcover)

SHORT PEOPLE, the first book of stories by the very talented Joshua Furst, is more than just a superb collection of short stories - it is a unique format of exploring the minds of children. Furst has written plays and his intensely pungent dialogue he writes for his characters reflects that experience. Furst scoops out ordinary children (whose view of the universe is nascent if unsoiled by truth) and has them interact to suggest the way simple incidents of childhood can brew into adult character deviations. He tells 'reports' of a dysfuntional family the way those dysfuntions are perceived by children and in doing so he makes 'mature deviant behavior' all the more terrifying. There are stories that play for laughs (how well he knows the terror of guilt imposed by onanism, by sexual exploration, by body image perceptions!) and stories that are devastatingly sad. Interspersed between these ten tales are one page 'document statements' about such occult trials as incest, physical abuse, autism, hyperactivity, etc and it is only in one of the final stories that the reason for insertion of these strange small 'fragments' emerges.

In one of the most successful stories, "Failure to Thrive", a nurse describes the 'short people' in her care in a special care nursery: "They were the children of frail, wealthy women in need of extra recovery time, or poor women there without family, or women whose husbands were out at the bar, whose boyfriends were in jail, whose handful of lovers had no idea - and never would - that they'd just given birth; these were the children of children who would never see them, of women who would never want the, of parents already beginning to feel guilty for being less capable than they knew they should be."

Powerful stuff, this. Yet there is also much to just entertain in Furst's writing. His ideas are so pregnant that they beg to be extended into full novels. Despite the 'short story' nature of this first book, it still is a page turner that is very difficult to put down. An excellent debut!