I've always been a fan of short story collections and anthologies, especially those of the contemporary sort. This collection focuses on interwoven stories set in both the US and Japan with an emphasis on capitalism, socialism and community. Each story focuses on a particular character or set with first-person narratives that invoke realism. One great story to start with is Maureen.

Sometimes when I read a short story collection, I feel a sense of whiplash when I go from one story to another with vastly different topics, themes, and styles. There's nothing wrong with a diverse format, but I thoroughly enjoyed the interconnectedness of all of this collection. The characters and their situations were well-written.

And Then.....?

These stories are well written in an established, by the book, MFA fashion. The little details, the spoken and unspoken sighs, the hint of flinty superiority through suffering. The occasional elegantly constructed, if brittle, throwaway line or observation. But it was so inconsequential. Stay or go home -- but move on.

(Please note that I received a free ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

This was a FANTASTIC short story collection. All of the stories went together well, and I was excited to get to the next one.

I was not about this at all. Nothing grabbed my attention. I rarely refuse to finish a book but I just could not slog through this one beyond 28%.

a collection of short stories with something for every kind of reader. So engaging that you will be excited to get to the next story.

I love a good collection of short stories, and Jen Silverman's The Island Dwellers is not just good, it's fantastic. There isn't a story that falters or falls out of place, each just as strong as the last. Edgy, dark, at times neurotic, Silverman proves her mettle in the world of short story. I will be keeping an eye out for her future works! I'm thankful for this truly great introduction to her writing.

This was a collection of stories about the world of young people entering the 'adult' world most in the creative career path. The stories also come from diverse character from race to gender and sexual orientation, which was such a refresher.

These stories felt very real due to their accuracy in the modern world's social environment. Also the dialogue between the characters was close to what conversations between young people actually sound like. I know the writer is a successful playwright and that is perhaps why this book was so good. She understood how the actually real world moves and how people react to it in these modern times.
I'm very excited to see more of her work through a play or literature. I'm a fan.

I am usually very picky about short story collections and I am not a fan of the kinds of characters that pepper these pages, but I could not put down this collection. The title comes from the settings, the islands in question are mostly Japan and New York. I encourage you to pick this book up and get lost in the lives of the characters we meet here. It is worth it.

The Island Dwellers is a fascinating collection of loosely-related stories set in the US and Japan. The tone of each is interesting: the bright, garish lights of Tokyo and NYC flicker against the shadows within each of the characters. The darkness is a comforting place for many of them and Silverman does a fantastic job painting each unique narrator while giving us a picture of the world around them.

Even as some of the characters inhabit the same neighborhoods, they each see something different. Basing the collection within certain physical locations gives a holistic view many short story collections lack and finding Easter eggs related to previous parts in later stories is a delight as a reader. It's those connections which keep the collection moving along and the increasing complexity shows us the world Silverman has created within our own.

My favorite pieces included the following: "Pretoria" (heartbreaking), "Maria of the Grapes" (beautiful and my favorite of the entire collection), "White People" (hilarious social commentary), and "The Wolf" (quirky and oddly sweet). Probably the strangest thing about this book is the beginning and ending stories. Usually you try to hit a high note in both but I think the first and last stories were the weakest two by far. However, you're rewarded for your patience with "Pretoria" as the second story so it's worth it.

Note: I received a free Kindle edition of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I would like to thank NetGalley, the publisher Random House, and the author Jen Silverman for the opportunity to do so.

I find myself in a very unusual position with this book. I have been fortunate enough to have read some truly fantastic books through NetGalley however, this one just didn't do it for me. I knew the stories were interconnected but some of them were just not interesting to me. I liked the story of " Maria of the Grapes" but others just were almost too hard to relate to. I do appreciate how difficult it is to weave the various stories together but I just was unexcited by this read and it took me way longer to finish because of that.

Jen Silverman is a playwright with a list of awards as long as your arm. With this impressive collection of short stories, she steps into the world of prose with guns a-blazing. Thanks go to Net Galley and Random House for the DRC, which I received free and early in exchange for this honest review. This book is now for sale.

Silverman’s contemporary fiction is themed, as the title suggests, around people that live on islands in various parts of the world. Everything here is edgy and a little bit dark. Her characters are melancholy, naïve, neurotic, bent, and at times laugh-out-loud funny; she doesn’t leave her endings—or her readers—hanging, and I didn’t successfully predict the way any of her stories would turn out. We have destructive relationships; relationships that are hellishly unequal; artists that aren’t really; strange, strange animals—oh, hell, that Japanese pit viper! But the thing that ties these tales together, apart from the theme, is deft, tight writing.

Anyone planning a vacation should pack this title, whether in paper or digitally. Short stories are terrific for bed time and when traveling, because the end of each story gives the reader a reasonable place to pause even when the prose is masterfully rendered, as it is here. This volume was released May 1, 2018 and is highly recommended.

A gorgeous collection of loosely-connected short stories. The protagonists (nearly all young women) are people adrift, most of them in cities that are somehow foreign to them. A bored, married white woman in Manhattan begins to write a novel about her new hook-up’s Venezuelan childhood—without his permission or input. A twenty-something in Brooklyn suffers through her boyfriend's performance art. A nice professor in Iowa City decides to become a bad person—but only when she’s sleeping with her TA. A Russian factory worker in Japan frets about her best friend and lover, who is also the kept girlfriend of a member of the yakuza. A recent college graduate in New York works for a scattered, eccentric rich woman (for no money) and harbors a crush on her boss's probably-straight assistant. Background characters reappear, often years later and at different stages of their lives. This lends the collection a lovely sort of mid-aughts indie movie feel (everything is connected, even if only by a wispy thread).

As with most short story collections, not every piece will land for every reader. I lost interest in "Mamushi," but found every other story compelling. I enjoyed these stories so much that, on release day, having already read the egalley, I bought the audiobook and listened the the entire collection over the course of two days. I'm not usually a re-reader, but I know I will revisit these.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for providing me with an egalley in exchange for my honest review.

Sometimes funny, sometimes sad - but always interesting! These characters are mostly like people I may have seen from afar but never known. Most of them are younger than I am and wilder than I ever was and yet the questions they face in life are universal.

The Island Dwellers is a loosely connected collection of short stories featuring backgrounds around the world and young people, mostly adrift, who are looking to connect to life. In places it was quite sad, and others portrayed simple lackadaisical life-goes-on tales. This didn't work, so we will move on, to the next island, the next job, the next party.

I found the information shared about the various locales intriguing - a completely different look at world centers such as Singapore and Johannesburg which I have previously only 'seen' through the eyes of the not so young. And the humor, often sarcastic but always astute, kept me reading way past my bedtime.

I received a free electronic copy of this collection of short stories from Netgalley, Jen Silverman, and Random House Publishing Group in exchange for an honest review. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me.

Jen Silverman's stories of foreigners in island cities and countries are haunting. She elegantly contrasts the earthiness of South African, Columbia, America against the cleanness and safety of Japan, and finds both the Japanese and foreigners as distant as they were in the time of Perry and the Shogun.

The Wolf was one of the strangest and funniest stories I’ve read — A dead body goes on a first date.

In the recycling of her characters from story to story, Silverman makes us feel we are part of their larger community, and part of their obsessions with each other.

Above all, however, I Was Anastasia presents readers with a novel take on the impact of identity on our past, our future, and our legacy. Whether or not Anna Anderson was truly Anastasia did not matter so long as she was giving us the Grand Duchess we needed, when we needed it. During the more difficult moments of the book to get through (tw: rape, restraint, drugging, electro-convulsive therapy), I found myself looking forward to Anna's point of view, just to make me feel like everything turned out at least okay enough to make jokes about beer, or to tear a man apart in five languages (and in as many minutes). This was the true strength and cleverness of the infamous woman, and is a testament to Lawhon's mastery of history, emotions, and the way they come together. I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone who values all of the above.

'I am concerned because Camilo is inherently clumsy with things like words and money and other people’s feelings.'

I devoured these interconnected stories that are about being shipwrecked in loneliness yet in constant motion, and every character seems to be in a sort of emotional underground. There was something so funny to me about Girl Canadian Shipwreck, the performance art had me laughing about the discomfort the girlfriend feels when she’s meant to rally support for her lover, at her desire to escape the very thing her boyfriend feels so passionate about. White People is perfection as Cynthia falls for Venezuelan Elias, and builds in her mind such ridiculous cultural clichés that you can’t feel bad for her in the least. Tired of white conversations, the rich meals and the sterile, privileged life she was living, Cynthina imagines (while in the process of divorce from her husband Seth) how different a life she could lead, now that she’s found Elias. There is meat to a bohemian existence, so what if she has to forsake creature comforts? But does she really? Can’t she just return to wealth, isn’t this just ‘slumming’ for her, so very brave she imagines she is for this love? Can she really remove herself from her charmed life, can someone’s ‘ethnicity’ rub off on you? Isn’t he just another ‘exotic dish’ she orders? I love the reaction Elias has later when he uncovers the past Cynthia has invented for him. There isn’t a story in this collection that failed to engage me with intelligence, humor or devastating sorrow. Whether characters were adrift, spinning in circles, begging for love or using it to manipulate as a means for survival, I was invested in the outcome.

Expats living in Japan deal with more than complicated relationships, there is the threat of the yakuza shadowing lovers when one becomes a kept woman. A body in a suitcase manages to be a sexy date story for a girl named Rachel in Wolf. Love hotels paint the scene in Mamushi, where a tale of brutal sexuality encompasses a tender love story that explains so much about the distance inside of Ancash. Love that can’t be spoken, something broken inside of Ancash that makes him cold, the desperate violent desire he inspires in others, so many swoon for him but the one he loves, wanting nothing more than to keep him for their own. Ancash appears to have a fluid sexuality, but there is someone, only one person whom really has teeth in his heart, and doesn’t even know it. Because sometimes the one you want to understand you can’t, and you protect them from yourself.

Some of the stories are light and funny until the next tale plunges you into the dark, disturbing pain of other characters yet all of them are equally captivating. There is so much said in every terrible choice made. There is avoidance in easy blindness, in what we project unto each other neglecting to really see what is inside of someone. We all do it, to some degree. It’s hard to review this collection because the tales are all different, though they are connected and unique.

Pike interestingly had me remembering one of my favorite biographies, it is mentioned in the story. Lover of Unreason by Yehuda Koren and Eliat Negev, about the woman who came between Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Assia Wevill. If you get a chance, read it, you won’t be disappointed. I was tickled to read about Assia Wevill again, as I swallowed the afore-mentioned biography years ago, Silverman’s story about Cora was like a confection, poisoned by the ‘other woman’ that gives rise to another Assia. Innocuous meetings are often the ones we should pay attention to, as they can be the beginning or ending of our own love stories. Much like Hughes and Plath, a woman named Cora enters the colony of artists and stirs more than passions, is such a powerful presence that she cannot be ignored, nor her magnetic appeal denied. Is she an act? Cora resembles Assia in her hunger and need for company, that bottomless pit that can never be filled. “She’s like a tornado, everything she touches ends in destruction.” The highs and lows of love, the gaping wounds of betrayal, that ever-present other… other woman, other man, other something we all face in relationships, fuels the story and is painfully relatable, if your eyes are open. When love is young and fresh, we don’t notice the looming threats waiting to brutalize it. A tale of trust and it’s absence, the Pike is the perfect ending to this gorgeous collection of biting, intelligently written stories. Yes, add this to your to be read pile! I cannot wait to hear what other readers take from it!

Publication Date: May 1, 2018

Random House

This is my first book of short stories that I have read in a really long time. They are not usually my preferred genre, but I thought it was time I try them again.
I really enjoyed this collection. Most of these stories are about young adults trying to figure out life. They take place in mostly Tokyo and New York with a few in the Midwest. Same characters pop up in different stories not really tied in to the previous story, but in a story of their own or a major part. These read easily and I enjoyed the settings. I give this a 3.5. Thank you NetGalley for the book in exchange for an honest opinion.

I found this to be a wonderful collection of short stories. Readers will become immersed in the characters lives as well as their surroundings. The stories are deep, packed with emotion and powerful. Well worth reading!

I received a complimentary copy of this book. The opinions expressed in this review are my own.