“Shapiro’s writing is crisp, refreshing and affecting—highly recommended."
Kirkus (starred review)


“The breath of life flows through every one of Janice Shapiro’s wonderful stories, and you can feel the heart beating very close to the surface. Bummer is terrifically smart, with a kind of comic energy that can swerve at any moment into eloquent brokenheartedness. I loved this book”

Charles Baxter
The Feast of Love

 

“BUMMER is an exciting collection by a writer with an engaging and distinctive voice. Janice Shapiro’s stories are darkly funny, sexy and very smart.”

Tom Perrotta
The Abstinence Teacher, Little Children, Election

“Janice Shapiro’s beautifully interwoven story collection, BUMMER, is about the drive to always locate satisfaction the next precinct over. This drive is often phrased as sex, or desire, or romance, the yearning for the other, but to me all this sex talk is just a metaphor for the larger human hunger for “meaning,” satisfaction, fulfillment, peace, contentment – which aren’t going to arrive, not in your or my lifetimes. This amazingly gutsy, fully voiced book bears comparison with the best work of Antonya Nelson, Mary Gaitskill, Lydia Davis, Amy Hempel and Lorrie Moore.”

David Shields
Reality Hunger, The Thing About Life Is One Day You’ll Be Dead, Dead Languages

Janice Shapiro’s Bummer is bold, brave, and bitingly clever.  Defying stereotypes and easy characterizations, Shapiro’s female characters are sharp, intelligent, rebellious, bighearted, stubborn, independent, and emotionally fraught all at one.  Shapiro’s keen ear for dialogue and her deep and appealing humor make this collection an undeniable pleasure to read. 

Victoria Patterson
author of Drift

“Janice Shapiro writes at both an ironic, hilarious remove and with deep empathy for her characters. Droll yet sincere, funny yet pleasurably painful, the stories in BUMMER let us feel we’re in on it all: the sad joke of existence, and the pathos too. Shapiro’s stories deliver smart weirdos and self-consciously extraordinary women, men and children with angst aplenty. They exist as both curiosities and happy, articulate, funny personifiers of the symptoms of an epidemic of humanity. Women break into neighbor’s houses, love dying men, kiss special ed students. They struggle against their real if often goofy oppression, with Shapiro always winking and nodding in our direction. She asks us big questions --- funny, punk, smart and sexy. Readers will laugh, tremble, shake with recognition, then look up from this remarkable collection to make sure nobody has seen them react. They’ll re-read to make sure they’ve understood and then, like me, start over from the beginning for more of the delight of Shapiro’s asking.”

Andrew Tonkovich
Editor, Santa Monica Review