Help Yourself is a slim volume of three short stories by a leader in short story writing, Curtis Sittenfeld. If you’re American, or read The New Yorker, O or New York magazine regularly you may have read these already. But as these magazines are expensive (and hard to get!) locally, I hadn’t read any of them. This volume won’t take you all day to read, but it is thoroughly entertaining.

Sittenfeld’s characters are flawed, sometimes to the point where they are unlikeable. But like them or not, they are fascinating – and recognisable. In White Women LOL, the main character is trying to redeem herself by searching for a neighbour’s lost dog. Race and white fragility come together in this story, while Creative Differences looks at the price of a tiny amount of fame and how willing people are to accept the agenda of big business. (Not to mention complex relationships and trade-offs). Show Don’t Tell is the final story about a group of writers in graduate school, and petty disagreements and competitiveness between them. What makes a writer? What makes a writer successful? Does genre matter?

The stories are sharp, with absolutely no filler. As with You Think It, I’ll Say It, any of these stories could become a full novel. They are raw, and keenly observant of how people act and feel, both good and bad. Definitely worth your time and energy.

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