Steven Barthelme’s new collection of short stories Hush Hush plays like the best of saddest love songs. These are elegiac, yet hopeful stories about characters who bumble through existence, struggle to articulate their feelings, and careen towards moments that can’t be unlived and precipices where possibility, crushing loss, and logic-less misdeeds intersect. Which is to say that Barthelme’s view of the world is a luckless, but romantic one.

Read the rest of my review in The Rumpus.