This irresistibly titled collection more than pays off it's cover promise with an unusual series of tales built around characters befuddled by where they are in life, and the choices behind and ahead of them. Each story is a jewel that stops without actually ending plot-wise-- instead concluding in a surprising yet inevitable emotional note of realization, like O'Henry tales where the clever twist is of the mind and heart and not what physically happened in the stories. You've not read anything quite like it. I'm thrilled it's finally out in paperback. ( )

The Virginity of Famous Men by Christine Sneed


In a short fiction scene currently smitten with flash, Christine Sneed’s The Virginity of Famous Men is something of an outlier. A collection of longer stories cast in the classic, American tradition, this is a carefully balanced, fully realized set of several-thousand-word pieces, any number of which you might come across in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, or some year’s edition of Best American Short Stories.

Filled with interesting content about the film business (at various points from the industry’s chilly periphery to its steamy superstar center), smart humor, and realistic characters, these stories are light on experimentation, though Sneed does make a few interesting formal choices. In addition to an entire story constructed as a curriculum vitae (“The New, All-True CV”), Sneed uses one recurring device I enjoyed quite a bit, “the time-stop ending.” A story with a “time-stop ending” concludes unexpectedly, avoiding the usual, extended denouement. The reader is left to construct the ending herself, suggesting there are, in fact, no easy, moral answers to Sneed’s stories, that reality could work out any number of ways.

The Virginity of Famous Men is about patriarchy, the pitfalls and pratfalls of a societal structure that leaves older, successful men as its silent beneficiaries, women and (to a lesser extent) younger men as its victims. But this isn’t a political book. This is about real people, living real lives, many struggling with romantic relationships or the lack thereof. In The Virginity of Famous Men, Sneed gives readers a heady display of literary talent—skill broad enough to pull off drama and comedy in equal turns, deep enough to do so with seemingly effortless style and grace.

http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/kbaumeister/2016/10/the-nervous-breakdowns-re... ( )