Do the Windows Open?

Do the Windows Open? is a smashing debut by short-story writer Julie Hecht. Bound together by the insight and wit of her neurotic narrator, Hecht's short stories document the mania of the modern day in devastating detail. Hecht's narrator, a forty-something photographer, moves through the world burdened by the mundane and tawdry incidentals of contemporary existence. Taking in fertility clinics, hairpieces, obnoxious speech patterns and omnipresent consumer demographics, nothing escapes her eye or avoids her comment. The intelligence of her judgment negates the inanity of much of what she sees, and her stories become a tragicomic critique of her affluent and stifling social milieu.