This Is My Voice

The stories in Jonathan Penner's This Is My Voice live on paradox. They are seriously funny and hilariously sad. The characters' overwhelming regularity, their complete and convincing familiarity, is the device by which they become almost unspeakably odd: as though Penner had somehow become both Henry James and Donald Barthelme. In this marvelous collection of fictions, he brings us people of all ages and social circumstances and places them, often, outside of their accustomed contexts so that we see them, as they suddenly see themselves, with stunning vividness.