This collection of 11 short stories is a thought-provoking, funny, and sometimes depressing look into modern-day lives and relationships. The common thread running throughout these stories is regret and dissatisfaction. The main characters are all discontented in some way, with their marriages, their jobs, or just their lives in general. They get caught up in elaborate fantasies and inner reflections, and so tend to make mistakes when they return to their real lives. That, or they attempt to escape their discontent by making rash decisions that lead to chaos.
A standout to me was The Dinner Party, in which a couple preparing to host another couple for dinner joke around because the husband dislikes the couple. But as the evening goes on, and the other couple never shows up, it becomes clear that the relationships are not as they seemed. I also particularly enjoyed The Breeze, in which a wife and her husband struggle to make the most of a beautiful spring day, but the wife dissolves into a hopeless anxiety as she pictures not only the infinite number of possibilities for that day, but for the rest of her life. More Abandon (Or Whatever Happened to Joe Pope?) was another enjoyable story about a bored, lonely office worker who stays at the office overnight one night and wreaks havoc.
These are stories about imperfect people making mistakes. The characters are anxious, neurotic, lonely, and desperate, and their complexity makes them feel real to the reader. The stories are very well-constructed, though they often move slowly and don’t have much action. Still, Ferris’ writing always left me entertained and wanting more.

I sensed a thread of introspection weaving through Ferris' new short story collection, particularly concerning time. I could drill it down another level and say these are stories about people in the process of realizing that time truly is a limited commodity. In some it provokes fear, in others new life. In every case these musings cause interesting changes.

I won't summarize each story, but must mention briefly my favorite in the compilation, "The Valetudinarian". A darkly comic take on the Matrix (my interpretation), it involves a thirty-something hooker, a rapidly aging widower and a blue pill that completely changes his outlook on the rest of his life. This one is a must read.

While not every story is comical, there are elements of humor in each. Most often this is accomplished via Ferris' facility with dialog. Modern sounding and so well timed, one gets the sense he'd be equally at home writing scripts.

It's my understanding that most or all of the collection has previously been published but fans of Ferris will be happy to have them collected in one place and those new to the author will find the stories to be an excellent jumping off point into his longer works.

I'm a fan of Joshua Ferris' books (loved Then We Came to the End), but I'm not a fan of short stories, so this book fell flat for me.

Quirky and sometimes interesting, but missed the mark for me.

I love short stories and Joshua Ferris, so I was immediately drawn to this collection. I really enjoyed his characters and Ferris's unique approach to story telling.

I’ve heard nothing but good things about Joshua Ferris’s books ( Then We Came to the End, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour ), so I was excited to dive into his new book of short stories. Nearly every story highlights the imperfection and uncomfortableness of life. Some highlight small, mundane actions while others focus on larger topics like bad marriages.

In one story, we watch as a couple lives out one of life’s most painful conversations: “‘What do you want to do tonight?’ ‘I don’t know. What do you want to do?’ ‘It doesn’t matter to me. Whatever you want to do.’” Another is about a small-time actor/writer obsessing over whether a well-known actress meant to invite him to her party or if it was just a mistake. In the last story, a man wonders why the man he hired to help him move won’t have a proper conversation with him.

There are plenty of in-depth looks at people during their most awkward and neurotic moments, some of which I found oddly relatable. While overall I enjoyed this book, it often felt drawn-out and took too long to get to the point. While it makes sense that an anxious person undergoes question after question in their heads, I didn’t need to know every little detail. The writing itself flowed well, and it makes me want to seek out Ferris’s other books and determine whether his novels are more condensed.

Thank you to NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company for the digital copy!

Very well written but some of the stories seemed to lack arc and overall development. I would have liked fewer stories with longer length that would have allowed for more development..

I was in the car with my husband listening to NPR when we heard an interview with Joshua Ferris on his new book The Dinner Party and Other Stories. My husband is no fan of short stories but he said to me, "I'd read that book." I smirked because I knew I COULD read it. Being pre-approved by Little, Brown & Co. on NetGalley has its perks!

I downloaded the book and started reading.

These twelve stories are about how good people can make really bad decisions. The stories have humor, ironic twists, and chillingly bad choices. I was mesmerized.

In More Abandon, or What Ever Happened to Joe Pope? a man trashes and rearranges the offices of his coworkers, then turns the lights off. He thinks, "An odd scruple. But it's not the world that needs destroying, just his world."

The Stepchild concerns a man who is brooding over his failed marriage. He shows up at the apartment of a married woman he met once. He tells his sad story, and they talk, and 'fall in love'. At the end of the day, he returns to his ever suffering wife.

In The Dinner Party, a couple argues about friends who are late for dinner. The husband can't endure another meal with them, but his wife insists on keeping contact with one of her oldest friends. Finally, the wife retreats to bed leaving the food to spoil while the husband goes to see if their friends are ok. He arrives to find a party going on. His wife's friend knows their friendship is a sham, but he unable to tell his wife the truth.

In The Valetudinarian, Arty and his wife retire to Florida, then his wife dies leaving him alone in a strange place. He withdraws from life and nurses his unhappiness.When his children call for his birthday, he tries to engage their attention with complaints about his health. Then a prostitute shows up at his door, a birthday gift from a friend.

The Pilot concerns a scriptwriter who can't believe he has been invited to a party hosted by a famous director/actor. He wonders, was it a mistake? Should he go? He's been sober for sixteen months but the party unnerves him and he slips.

In The Fragments, a man's wife works later and later until one night she does not come home at all. He is sure she is having an affair. He broods over dividing their things. As he dismantles their life, his wife returns home.

Life in the Heart of the Dead takes place in Prague. A businessman goes on a historical tour of the city. He realizes his whole life has been 'a tour' without a destination.

In A Night Out, Tom and Sophie are reconciling after being estranged over his affair. When Tom speaks to a woman, Sophie is sure she was his mistress and disappears to follow her. Tom searches the city for his wife, finding he is too broke for subway fare. At a bar, he discovers his credit card has been canceled. Sophie's jealousy spurs her into an extreme act of revenge that could cause harm to herself. Meantime, Tom's real ex-mistress shows up at an inopportune time.

In one of the most disturbing stories, A Fair Price, Jack, asks what are we here for? Do we have some greater purpose in life as men? He has been a disappointment to his father, always making 'a hash' of things. He hires a man to help him move some things and unsuccessfully tries to engage him in human contact. In frustration, Jack vents his anger and is left to consider what a 'good' man does when he has done something wrong.

A fatherless son watches his mother throw out one more man in Ghost Town Choir. The man understands the child longs for a father. "Hell, who couldn't use a daddy?" he thinks, apologizing that he couldn't help. His mother responds by changing things around her instead of herself.

I loved the writing, descriptions like "his mustache moved up and down like a centipede." And lyric passages like this from The Breeze: "The children's voices carried in the blue air. Then the breeze came. It cut through the branches of trees, turning up the silver undersides of the young leaves."

My favorite story was The Breeze. On a perfect day, Sarah imagines a perfect time with her husband. She feels under pressure to do something memorable. She feels her husband is dull and her life is passing by without having really lived. Plans are made and go awry as she imagines possible outcomes.

There is a desperation in Sarah, "thinking her options were either a picnic or death." There is a longing for a fuller, more authentic life. "She wanted to be a different person, a better person, but he was perfectly happy being his limited self." Sarah is wise enough to realize that happiness is something she must find for herself for no person can give it to you.

In the end, she makes the right decision, finally understanding how they can both enjoy this one and perfect day in a beautiful and simple act of invitation.

These are stories I want to read again.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Read for Short Story Month--May, 2017. Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and author for the opportunity to read an arc of this book for an honest review.

These stories were my first taste of Joshua Ferris's writing so I cannot make a comparison to his full-length novels. However, these short stories beautifully showcase the writer's skill at characterization and the ability to get into each person's neurotic thoughts or bad choices in a few brief pages. Some, like The Breeze, were very inventive, with a young wife imagining over and over again the way an evening could turn out. Some were startling and painful, such as A Fair Price or A Night Out. All were well-worth reading.

THE DINNER PARTY by Joshua Ferris is a measured, slow burning book of eleven stories of modern fiction filled with complex, unusual characters that reveal themselves via anxiety ridden situations covering everything from infidelity and rejection to career failure and even murder.

This dour collection of what amounts to urban morality tales does have a smattering of humor peppered here and there among the narratives but on the whole, for this reader at least, it was like sitting through a re-run of that old Ernest Borgnine movie MARTY where the conversations (both verbal and internal) are passive and boring.

Most of the situations are full of antipathy and self –delusion and while the stories themselves may provide some enlightenment as they examine life under a microscope - - one begins to wonder if any of these people would be someone you would want in your own life as a friend or significant other.

I keep wanting to recreate the magic of Then We Came to the End (2007), so I read this collection even though I’m not a short story person. Other reviewers I’ve heard (including Ferris himself) have basically characterized the protagonists of these stores as a (mostly male) bunch of assholes. It’s true that you wouldn’t want to spend too much time with them, so maybe the short story format is good for that. I personally found them more poignant than some others did. Sure, some were straight-up assholes, but others struck me as just wanting something they couldn’t have, in a childish kind of way: a perfect day, a married coworker. “More Abandon, or What Ever Happened to Joe Pope?” was the tragicomic best of the bunch.

Thanx to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for this honest review.

Ferris is one of the few writers who can actually make me LOL, and he doesn't disappoint with this short story collection; although many of them are on the more dour side, and chronical, for the most part, lives of quiet desperation. I usually don't enjoy short stories, and rarely read them, and although a few of these are not QUITE up to his usual 5 star excellence, they are all readable and some even quite memorable. But I will look forward to Ferris returning to the novel form, at which he is an undisputed master.

A reader does not have to like a character to identify with them, even with their worst qualities. That certainly happens while reading The Dinner Party by Joshua Ferris. The Dinner Party is a collection of eleven short stories, most of them focused on male anxiety and neuroses. All of them feature driven inner monologues that prove if we could read each others’ minds civilization would end in three hours.

The title story, The Dinner Party, gives us a man and wife preparing to host a dinner party with the wife’s friends whom the husband does not like. He insists on predicting the entire night’s conversation and mocking her friends, friends who never arrive. The Valetudinarian is an amusing story of how a self-obsessed bore finds a new lease on life by nearly dying. It’s kind of sweet and very funny. In The Pilot, we hear all the neurotic obsessing of the completely insecure. Leonard is a screenwriter who has been invited to one of the hottest Hollywood parties ever and is pretty sure that is has to be a mistake because he is not that successful. His relentless worrying and fretting over whether that was a real invite or a mistake, what to wear, what to say, is heartbreaking and hilarious.

In The Breeze, you have one of those what do you wanna do, no what do you wanna do quandaries that unfold in a multiverse of possibilities. It is my favorite story in the book–perhaps because so many of the stories are about male anxiety and alienation. More Abandon
(Or Whatever Happened to Joe Pope? is another story with real humor and heart, a story that shows you the dangers of working late at the office. Work late, ruin your life. A Fair Price is different from the others in its consequences, but again, we have man talking himself into destruction, a common theme throughout the book. Without self-talk, this book would be tiny and have no plot.



I liked The Dinner Party very much even if many of the people are detestable. Perhaps we all are detestable in our heads in different ways. The insecurity, anxiety, delusion, excuse-making, rationalization, and obsession all seems very plausible and real, though perhaps exaggerated.

These are not stories about likable people, but perhaps that is the point. We can understand and even empathize despite their flaws. Ferris is compassionate and is challenging us to find our own compassion for these lost and lonely men and women who either do not know what they want, do not want what they have, or are in the process of losing what they want and what they have even when it is their fault.

I received a copy of The Dinner Party from the publisher through NetGalley.

A book of short stories make up this collection. The stories are about life, love, marriage, friendship,etc. There are various topics that the stories are about. One of the reasons I am a fan of short stories, is that there is usually something for most tastes. This is a good book that can be digested at leisure. Thanks to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for the ARC of this book in return for my honest review.

Six short stories, culminate in one great book of everything that encompasses adulthood. Ferris always makes us see the world through a new lens.

I love Ferris' writing and his short stories stand proudly alongside his novels. This is really a terrific book. I received a free copy in exchange for my review.

The Dinner Party by Joshua Ferris is a highly recommended collection of eleven previously published short stories. The stories in The Dinner Party, six of which were first published in The New Yorker, are about "the modern tribulations of marriage, ambition, and the fear of missing out..." The lives here are all changed in some way and at times the stories read like dark comedies. The writing is wonderful and there are several stories with surprising twists at the end. This is an admirable collection with only one story that I didn't enjoy as much as the others.

Contents:
The Dinner Party: A man loathes having to sit through another dinner party with his wife's friend and her husband. "He also wanted his wife and her friend to drift apart so that he never had to sit through another dinner party with the friend and her husband."

The Valetudinarian: It's Arty Groys birthday. The Florida retiree is at loose ends until he receives an unexpected gift "If I had known about any of this forty years ago, I wouldn’t be so gloomy today, but no one gives you a manual."

The Pilot: Leonard, who is writing a pilot for a TV show is invited to a party by Kate Lotvelt, a very successful writer, and he is unsure if she intended to invite him. "He and Kate, they weren’t…were they friends? Well, yeah, they were friends. They were acquaintances. They’d met twice, once at the producer Sydney Gleekman’s yearly blowout, and then, a few months later, at the actor’s dinner party."

A Night Out: A man is unable to hide his cheating from his wife. "She didn’t know how she knew. She just knew. Tom wanted not to have seen her, then he shifted with a smile and a loud, “Clara!” Clara was surprised to see him, or acted so. Tom introduced his wife. Clara complimented Sophie’s handbag."

The Breeze: A woman is out on the balcony, catching a pleasant spring breeze, which sets into motion endless possibilities for her but complacency from her husband. " 'In the brig!' Sarah called out and, with her wineglass at a tilt, peeked down again on the neighborhood. They called their six feet of concrete balcony overlooking the street the brig.

Ghost Town Choir: A fatherless boy watches his mother chase off another boyfriend. " 'Mom, why are you mad at Lawton?' She opened the window above the sink, and all her figurines fell into the water. 'Because I got an expiration date on my stupidity!'"

More Abandon, or What Ever Happened to Joe Pope?: A man stays in his office building long after closing. "But there is work to do, work to do, and that, he tells himself, is why he stays. It is nothing that can’t wait until tomorrow, but he is incapable of breaking free."

Fragments: A man listens to the fragments of conversations he hears while out walking, thinking about his life. "That night, Katy came home later than usual. He was up but feigned sleep. With the lights off, she tiptoed into the bedroom, making no effort to wake him. He wanted her to. He wanted her to say something, anything..."

The Stepchild: An actor's wife has left him and he's in despair. "...passersby might have thought him utterly seduced - until he turned and they glimpsed that he was crying. Then they knew they were in one of those city moments, a public audience to a stranger’s despair."

Life in the Heart of the Dead: A middle aged man spends an afternoon on a guided tour of Prague. "'It’s Prague Castle,' she said. 'And by the way,' she added, just when the whole table, and really the whole restaurant, seemed to go completely silent. 'For some reason, you keep calling it Czechoslovakia. You understand, I hope, that it isn’t Czechoslovakia anymore. It hasn’t been Czechoslovakia for twenty years. It’s the Czech Republic now.'"

A Fair Price: A man hires an older man to help him move his stuff but he becomes increasingly belligerent as the day progresses. "Nothing sucked more than moving your stuff out of storage. Luckily Jack had a hand. Guy he’d never met before named Mike. Ryan, his yard guy, had hooked them up. Mike worked for Ryan or knew Ryan somehow. Jack didn’t ask. He was just glad to have the help."

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of the publisher/author.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1994074710
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2017/05/the-dinner-party.html

Thank You to Little, Brown and Company for providing me with an advanced copy of Joshua Ferris' The Dinner Party and Other Stories, in exchange for an honest review.

PLOT- The Dinner Party and Other Stories, is the first short story collection from award-winning novelist, Joshua Ferris.

LIKE- I can't think of another author who writes stories that leave me feeling riddled with anxiety. I say this in the best possible sense, as Ferris leaves me feeling rattled and affected: His stories move me. I often pause to admire his creative descriptions or phrasing, and the way he writes short, sharp sentences that punch. He's just so darn talented!

This is a fabulous collection, but I want to comment on a few of my favorite stories.

The Dinner Party - Everyone experiences friendship fall-out, but where the blame lies, is usually subjective. Amy and her husband have invited Amy's long time friend and her husband over for dinner, but they never show. As they wait, Amy and her husband ( unnamed), make catty comments about their "friends" and bitch about them, often being quite cruel. Eventually as the night grows late and their phone calls go unanswered, their grumpiness turns to worry. Amy's husband drives over to their friend's house, only to discover that their friends, have thrown their own party on the same night. Rather than scuttle away, the husband decides to enter the party and be confrontational, especially when he finds other mutual friends at the party. The Dinner Party is often hilarious, but also holds a mirror up to our human tendency to gossip and complain about others, even those we consider to be friends. 

The Valetudinarian - This story is hilarious and unpredictable, following a grumpy senior widower, Arty, as he experiences a birthday surprise. The characters really pop, they're quirky, fitting with the Florida setting. Arty is a bit of a mess and desperate for attention, even if he has to get it through negative behavior. I couldn't help but both like him and shake my head at his antics. This story was so unexpected and funny.

The Pilot - This one made my stomach knot and gave me anxiety. Leonard is a budding screenwriter and he has been invited to a Hollywood wrap party with highly influential people. This could lead to connections and his big break, but Leonard can't seem to shake his worries. He's paranoid that he wasn't meant to be invited in the first place, he stresses over what to wear, he worries over the other people invited, et...he just can't seem to relax. This level of tension is continued through the entire story and it's infectious. The worst of it, is having lived in Los Angeles and been around industry friends, Leonard is a character that I know well. 

A Fair Price - Jack needs help moving his stuff out of a self-storage unit and he hires Mike, a middle-aged man who has been recommended by Jack's gardener. The two men couldn't be any more different. Mike is quiet, blue-collar, and rough around the edges. Jack is white-collar and concerned about manners. Right off the bat, Jack feels that Mike hates him. To make matters worse, Mike reminds him of Jack's abusive step-father. As the morning progresses, Jack magnifies every perceived slight and soon, his anger towards Mike grows out of control. I loved the pacing in this story, the building of a sense of danger. Jack's internal dialogue is both funny and unhinged. 

DISLIKE- Nothing. The collection is very strong, although there were a few stories that were less memorable than the ones mentioned above. 

RECOMMEND- Yes! If you're a short story fan, The Dinner Party and Other Stories is a fine collection, and if you are unfamiliar with Ferris, I'd like to direct you to any of his novels. He's a gifted storyteller and a must-read author.

The writing is well done and the stories are both funny and sad. To my mind, the characters are way too dramatic, self-serving and often obnoxious. However, this is probably a generational feeling and the author has modern day young people and their coping skills spot-on.

A great collection of short stories. I look forward to more by this author.