A Place in the World

In the tradition of Chekhov, Bill Gaythwaite writes stories about outwardly unremarkable people with remarkable inner lives. Funny, smart, intermittently heartbreaking, the stories in A Place in the World eschew literary pyrotechnics and privilege the art of storytelling. A fine collection.

Bill Gaythwaite’s revelatory collection makes me fall in love with reading again. So immersive are these sharp, quick-witted, and intricately observed stories that, in fact, they make me forget I was reading at all. Amaster at conveying emotions, Gaythwaite is particularly gifted at evoking the ones which are usually lower pitched — nostalgia, regret, and longing — making them as loud, palpable, and dramatic as the more chest-thumping emotions of rage and anger. Maybe that’s because these stories aren’t so much about loss or the past but the necessity to face them in order to move on. Not that it’s easy. Often, these characters come from small towns and small lives best left behind and forgotten, and as they bet on themselves and seek bigger lives in other places, they sometimes find that they must make choices that betray themselves and others for reasons that are heartbreakingly human. A moving, incisive collection of big-hearted stories that reverberate well past their reading.