Surprisingly good. Enjoyable stories of and or about cape cod. Maybe especially fun to read while on the cape.

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This is a collection of short stories, book excerpts, essays and poetry about the islands off Massachusetts. Included are Melville, Poe, Plath, Mailer, Paul Theroux, Vonnegut... My favorites are a short story by John Cheever called "The Chaste Clarissa" about a summer regular on the cape who spends his vacation trying to seduce a taciturn young wife whose husband is away, and the essay "Provincetown Diary" by Louise Rafkin, who won a place in the town's writing residence program.
This seemed like the perfect book for an end-of-summer read. ( )

This is a lovely collection of stories that anyone looking for the vacations of her childhood should read. They're not all happy; the Cape is a weird place in the off-season, and sometimes a weird place in the on-season (witness Kurt Vonnegut's story). But the collection ends on a proper note with Paul Theroux and his description of a summer vacation. As my dad says, a bad day on the Cape is better than a great day at work. ( )