This anthology, actually the first issue of what one hopes will be a highly successful literary magazine, is chock full of treasures. One could do a lot worse to discover the voices of tomorrow than look herein. Let's hope this issue garners its contributors some recognition, some prizes and careers to make readers heads swim for decades to come.

I absolutely love this book. It is a fine collection of stories by current, up and coming, new and established, honest and intellegent writers who write because they have always written. And while I've read it cover to cover, I still flip through for inspiration and laughs. Keep it by the bed, keep it under your pillow, but keep it near by if you can't read it until later, like after dinner, or whatever, just keep it around, because this little gem deserves a read.

This is a fine collection of new writings. Jeff Boison and Whitney Pastorek have outdone themselves. The selections by Bob Beier, Thisbe Nissen and the novelist Tom Bradley particularly stand out. Tom Bradley takes us deep into the Chinese jungle, to the lair of a witch who listens to Lennie Tristano on a transistor radio. PINDELDYBOZ is a must-read!

I very rarely post reviews, but I was so taken aback that there were actually some negative reviews of this book, I felt I had to get on here and set the record straight. A writer myself, I was completely blown away by Thisbe Nissen's collection of short stories. She has an incredible gift for language and her writing is at once funny, moving, resonant, and true. In particular, her stories "Way Back When in the Now Before Now," "Flowers in the Dustbin, Poison in the Human Machine," "Grog," and "Out of the Girls' Room and into the Night" stand out as the most exceptional of the collection. All of her stories, however, are worth the read.

Book ReviewsBY AMANDA EYRE WARD November 26, 1999: Out of the Girls' Room and Into the Night by Thisbe Nissen The expression of love is the center of Out of the Girls' Room and Into the Night, an awe-inspiring collection of short stories by Thisbe Nissen, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award. Nissen's characters are young and yearning, and they come together in lovely and unexpected ways. A young video clerk in "The Mushroom Girl" pours his heart out into his beloved's intercom: "I think you think I'm crazy, and I'm not. I'm not crazy. It's just that I see a chance for something I think could make me happy in a world that is a generally not very happy place, and I can't just give up and walk away from that without doing everything I know how to do to make it happen." This flustered suitor is probably the most eloquent in the book; Roz Rozenzweig in "The Rather Unlikely Courtship of Edwin Anderson and Roz Rosenzweig" proposes marriage by calling to her lover, "C'mon, Gimp, waddaya say?" Words are not the only means of admitting love in Nissen's stories. In "Accidental Love," Lilith, a high school senior, listens to an older woman who tells her, "Love is an entity unto itself. There are patches of it all over the place. It's not really tangible, but it's there, pools of it." Lilith takes the woman's words to heart when she finds Steff, the boy she loves, fixing lights underneath a Christmas tree: "The TV is perched on a rolling cart, and I wheel it over to where we can watch before I crawl underneath the tree myself. I curl around Steff and bury my hands into the wool belly of his sweater, and we just lie like that for a while: spoons under the tree in this pocket of candle-blue." Although Nissen's characters are generally young and blessed -- traveling Deadheads, college housemates, wealthy New York teens -- Nissen bestows them with earnesty and explores their desires carefully and with gravity. This is a marked change from the cynical city gals currently in fashion in contemporary literature, and I found myself astonishingly moved by her character's simplest movements, like those of the lovers in "Fundamentals of Communication." In a college classroom, the lovers "sit, shifting occasionally, glancing at the glowing wall clock, waiting for 9:15. I can't see them as well now, in the shadows, but I catch the occasional movement in one of their hands, the caress of a finger, press of palm." They seem to have realized another character's observation that safety is "a point of contact." And perhaps, Nissen suggests, that's what love is as well.

I, too, was skeptical of reading a book of workshop fiction, but I found the characters endearing and the sensory details compelling. Ms. Nissen has an unjaded embrace of the real and a confident understanding of the struggles her characters face. This is an outstanding first collection.

"Flowers in the Dustbin, Poison in the Human Machine," by far the strongest piece in the collection, mirrors the power-popularity play among girls in a Manhattan magnet school with the bourgeois entitlement of their parents; the final title piece is an indictment of pseudofeminism and a display of the confusion that surrounds the self-empowerment of teenage girls. "When the Rain Washes You Clean You'll Know," "Grover, King of Nebraska," and "Way Back in the When Before Now," are also strong short stories.

As someone who lives in New York myself, and having read some positive press about Ms. Nissen, I was excited to pick up this book. While I found the characters, especially Roz and Miranda (the mother and daughter respectively) to be very realistic and easy to relate to on some levels, I felt that Miranda was vastly more interesting and that much more could have been done to demonstrate the effect that her parents relationship and her mother's actions had on her life.

I too, found the ending to this book unusually abrupt and disappointing. I think that much more could be written about the woman that Miranda was becoming and that the ending cut things off just as they were really getting interesting.

However, for a first novel, Ms. Nissen certainly entertained me and kept my attention, and I look forward to reading more of her work.

The Good People of New York is a parallel coming of age novel. The novel follows Roz, a slightly neurotic single mother and her daughter Miranda. One cannot read The Good People of New York and not recognize that Thisbe Nissen is an extremely talented writer. On the other hand, it seems as though her talent gets in the way of telling a good story. There are passages in this book where the paragraphs were so beautifully constructed and the metaphors were so creative, that I found myself admiring only the language and losing track of the story. In basketball terms, Nissen often uses a 360 reverse tomahawk dunk when a simple lay-up will do. The play leaves the audience oooing but it's still only two points.

The Good People of New York is still a very good novel, even if the plot feels a bit uninspired and Nissen's show of talent detracts slightly from the readability. I still recommend this book, but I wish Nissen creativity and flair carried through the entire work instead of a few flashy paragraphs.

I'd been waiting for this paperback for a long while. I thought the book sounded fascinating. And indeed, parts of it are. Feeling generous, I gave it four stars. I found parts of it be not well played (characters fade away--time shifts too quickly). In other parts of the book, I was geniunely moved by the characters and their traumas. There is a sense of growth--particularly in Roz and Miranda (Roz most of all, who becomes just a wonderful person--we see that Miranda is missing out during her rebellious years). Other plot twists I might have done without, but still, that is how life isn't it? We can't pick and choose what happens. Nissen seems to have drawn on some of her real life (as she hints at in her acknowledgements) and it may well be unfair to judge her twists and turns, particulalry if they are real. PErsonally, I liked Edwin and Darrin a great deal and would ahve liked to hear more from them. At it's heart, this is a story about mother and daughter. Being neither a mother or daughter, I might not be the best to comment on this book--however, in the end (and I Loved the END) they are indeed good people. And it is a good, but not great, book.

I hope you have a good plumber because you will be sorely tempted to flush this book down the toilet. The authors seem to have spent more time in Kindergarten than a prestigious writer's program. If you want lame, clipped-out-of-magazines collage work, why not take out a bunch of subscriptions and hand your kid a pair of scissors? If you want a sad, angry woman's cookbook, why not go with Martha Stewart rather than these amateurs? This book is truly scraping the bottom of the barrel to turn nothing into something that makes money.

This book will give you indigestion. A clever idea dissolves like Alka-Seltzer into a cloying mess of culinary kiss-and-tell. The recipes are superfluous...after the stories you'll be too nauseated to eat.

The Iowa dating market must be serving up heaping dishes of these authors' leftovers. Surprisingly absent from the lineup in this volume are the recipes for "Sloppy Seconds," "Gordon Gave Me Gonorrhea Goulash," and "I've Got Crabs, Louie." Perhaps they'll turn up in a sequel titled:
"Ex Cookbook 2: Montezuma's Revenge."

The NPR plug belied this trite piece of feminist fluff. The premise is cute, but the book writes itself. The authors' tales are commonplace, and the insipidity of their stories is passed off as poignancy. This book is destined for the 5 cent pile in many a garage sale.