The love and sex lives of commitment averse young Israeli ex-pats in New York. In addition to the Russian and Persian contributions to Jewish-American immigrant fiction in recent years we now have an Israeli too. But unlike the Persians and to a lesser extent the Russians, young single Israelis can go back and forth between their native and adoptive countries without having to put down roots. An auspicious debut. I look forward to this author's future work. Used copies are available in the USA f...

I really hated the first few stories, and almost gave up on the book. I muscled through because it was harder than you'd think to find an author with my same initials for the 2015 reading challenge. The later stories were better, but I felt like the author was trying too hard to be edgy for the sake of being edgy rather than because the subject of the story required it.

This is a gorgeous book. As I enter the fitting room, I close the door and stand in my underwear in front of the mirror, afraid. I want to feel that my life cannot go on without this dress. It's a beige dress with a white collar. There are tiny white butterflies all over, but you need to look closely to see. I slow down, slow down, slow down. But I can't slow down enough. The moment still comes when I try it on and don't fall in love. Falling in love never comes easy to me. I look at my disappoi...

I usually don't love short stories in rerospect as much as novels just because I easily forget them. Just as things are building and you start to get interested there's a tantalizing ending. While this collection elicits those same feelings, I still enjoyed reading it. It's a pretty sexy book. While the characters are lonely and stymied in various ways, at least most of them are getting some. I liked that some of the stories rather delicately reflect a modern Israeli-American experience, which i...

Much like the last book I read--RED CLOCKS by Leni Zumas--I'm rating this one a low four. And I'm doing so for similar reasons!These stories are largely stream-of-consciousness, light on the physical detail and narrative exposition. I feel like I should be more open to this in the short form, but I don't really think it's for me. Oria writes stories like "Documentation" and "Fully Zipped," which uses headers to delineate between different kisses that a couple shares or a woman's experience with

What I liked was the author's stream of consciousness writing style. It felt like someone was telling me a story over coffee rather than reading a book because they were written in a very conversational way. Even though they were all written in a similar storytelling style, the author was able to give each narrator an individual voice and all their circumstances were drastically different.I definitely had trouble connecting with the characters though, they made poor choices and loved the wrong p...

In my humble opinion, she has the freshest new voice in fiction. I normally hate short stories some of these were so good I actually reread them 2-3 times. She somehow drew me in with a story of just a few pages! Please please, Shelly Oria, publish a novel ASAP!

I discovered Shelly Oria at Writers with Drinks, where she read from "My Wife in Converse" and made nearly every line laugh-out-loud hilarious with her delivery, savoring each quirky observation ("He was a man in his sixties trying hard to look French. He smelled like years of garlic.") or cutting mundanity ("She looked at me like I had something on my face, but I knew that I didn't."). I flipped through the book and found deliciously witty lines in "Fully Zipped" ("As I enter the fitting room,

Shelly Oria's collection of short stories is truly beautiful prose. Having won this from a Goodreads giveaway, I gave it a chance, not expecting the impact it would proceed to have on me. While all of the stories are about love in one form or another, most of them are about love lost. Oftentimes, what characters gain in each other, they lose in themselves, and this is the true tragedy of these stories. We are introduced to a woman in a polygamous relationship who just can't stay loyal, an artist...

Here's the voice I have been looking for. These stories are captivating and original. With my favorites being: My Wife in Converse; Maybe in a Different Time; This Way I Don't Have to Be; and the ultimate, deliciously devastating: Wait. What a collection! While my enjoyment of this collection was complete-so it's really neither here nor there-the title story was my least favorite and I guess I mention this in case another reader has a similar experience (the title story being the first one in th...

This collection of stories is a good representation of the mentality of the writer's generation. It has some brilliant moments and strong sentences, but is not even in the level of stories. Some have magical realism elements in them, which I usually dislike, and mostly did here. Many deal with LGBT and alternative romantic and sexual relationships, which I know nothing about and therefore found it hard to relate to. Belonging to a different, older generation, I don't think I fully understood som...

2.5Many of these stories begin with long paragraphs of narrative summary, and in most of them, the summary continues and overshadows the action for the whole of the story. I liked the more realistic stories better, as I didn't feel the speculative elements Oria brought in often added any nuance to the character interactions or greater intention. A couple of the shorter stories, "Tzfirah" and "Wait" especially, worked well and had an edge that reminded me of Lydia Davis. A bit of Trinie Dalton, a...

Stories about young Israelis come to the States, mostly. Lot of women narrators, many of them lesbians or bisexual. The best in this collection touch notes of unsurety and longing, while others rely on the novelty of fantastical elements to carry their weight. Prose is smooth, but the narratives often seem a bit disjointed, or playing at it; paragraphs frequently are separated by the break of white space into their own sections of text. Highlighted perhaps by the discussion of such breaks in poe...

The relationship chronicled in kisses was an interesting format, and the one about the painter who left the family had some substance, but as a whole, this is not the book I thought I'd be reading based on the summary. The first couple stories were sex-centric without any graphic scenes, and in most of these tales I couldn't tell whether the narrator was male or female; everyone's voice was pretty much the same. It does seem like there are some good premises that would be interesting if they wer...

Found the stories to be hits or misses. Loved the idea from the second to last story, My Wife in Converse, that the past does not so much tell us about the future as our future will help us better understand our past. That’ll stick with me for a while.

The first thing you notice about the work of Shelly Oria is her voice: how it crackles, the syntax, startling in a way that’s almost reminiscent of Etgar Keret – and yet, Keret’s voice I’ve only read in translation, which makes Oria’s even more striking. Her original English shimmers with the hint of another tongue in both rhythm and diction, all of which lends refreshing wit to her prose. I cannot say enough about her language, how crisp and rich it is, rife with offhand wisdom, at once playful...

I really liked the prose of these stories, but few of them really stood out to me or are likely to be remembered later. I feel like the author should expand more on the character types that she writes, because many of these stories seemed be focused on a female character who is alluring and mysterious, but very fickle. At least 3 of the stories in this book are about our narrator struggling to keep the love and attention of this fickle female. It gets a little dull with such frequent repetition....

I couldn’t necessarily relate to the characters in this short story collection, but I enjoyed them and liked the various perspectives they represented. Since it is a quick read, the pessimistic tone didn’t frustrate me too much.