Ladies and Gentlemen (Vintage Contemporaries)

Amazon Best Books of the Month, July 2011: "Boys can't stay mad at each other about girls for too long. That's a job for men." Adam Ross's new collection of short stories, Ladies and Gentlemen, is filled with moments of such prickly poignancy, headshaking disbelief, and melancholic side glances. Ross, the author of last year's Mr. Peanut, has nearly perfected this thoughtful style of prose with a punch. The title story, about a woman contemplating an affair with a college crush, has an air of overwrought introspection, but ends with a surprisingly heartening notion of marriage. "Futures" follows a downtrodden middle-aged man as he searches for a job and mentors a young neighbor in whom he sees a younger version of himself, ending in a horrifying, if hilarious, job interview. In "When in Rome," a story of two brothers--one perfect, one not so much--Ross describes the vast expanse that can exist between siblings, as "a birthright that's as strong and arbitrary and ineluctable as love," and one realizes that this could illustrate Ross's feelings on life itself: "Because we feel we must honor this accident of our relatedness, we try to swim against it again and again." Each story a completely singular vignette, Ladies and Gentlemen is a darkly pleasurable read. --Alexandra Foster