' TALENT IN FULL BLOOM ' : BOOK REVIEW SNIPPET

'' It Will Come Back to You : Collected Stories. [ Stories that show talent in full bloom. ] By Sigrid Nunez.

Sigrid Nunez is a baby boomer who seems younger, because idiomatic speech always sounds young. She's been publishing fiction between hard covers since 1995, when she was in her mid-40s, but found the wider audience she deserved in 2018.

That's when her seventh novel, '' The Friend '' about a novelist who adopts her mentor's Great Dane, won the National Book Award. It was later adopted into a movie with Naomi Watts and Bill Murray.

Nunez's new book, '' It Will Come Back to You,'' is her first collection of stories. Most appeared originally in respectable but second-tier journals [ Prairie Schooner, Salmagundi, Daedalus, AGNI, Conjunctions ], before she broke through and began placing work in glossier and tonier venues.

The existence of the book reminds you why small journals matter to the literary ecosystem. To borrow the name of the comedy club chain, they're places to catch a rising star, and sometimes a falling one. You could subscribe to one for less than tonight's grubhub delivery.

I'm with novelist John Barth, who said his favorite literature is '' both of stunning literary quality and democratic of success.'' He might have been describing Nunez.

Her writing is threaded with erudite signifiers and high-minded conversation, but there's nothing pretentious about it. She's one of American fiction's most crisp and realized voices. Like the food in a good restaurant, her prose is excellent but unfussy.

The first five stories in '' It Will Come Back to You '' are superb. They're among her best work. They touch on themes that are omnipresent in Nunez's fiction : failed parents, clinical therapy, the relationship between teachers and students, how animals live among us.

They tend to be narrated by bright, sensitive women who carry ballasts of pain and melancholy and bruised wit.

The other dramatis personae, usually the parents, are architects and filmmakers and art curators and academics, as urbane and stylized and grotesque as the men and women in a Saul Steinberg drawing. 

!WOW! thanks Dwight Garner.