Survival Tips - by Miriam Gershow (Paperback)

About the Book

With wit and candor, the ten stories in Survival Tips: Stories follow characters through their friendships, their jobs, their marriages, and their grief as they stumble toward connection and meaning.

Book Synopsis

Survival Tips: Stories follows characters through their friendships, their jobs, their marriages, and their grief as they stumble toward connection and meaning. A wife begins communicating to her husband only in rebus puzzles. A new teacher confronts her strongest foes, the parents of a disruptive student. A group of conference-goers join their guru in a jerry-rigged sweat lodge. A woman shows up to her blind date in a "Don't Leave Me" t-shirt. With wit and candor, these ten stories examine the ways we live, the mistakes we make, and the paths we take in hopes of delivering us to ourselves and each other.

The collection features twenty years of stories that have appeared in The Georgia Review, Quarterly West, Pithead Chapel, Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast, and other top publications.

Review Quotes

"[Gershow's] acclaimed first novel, The Local News, was published fifteen years ago, while this assemblage of shorter fiction was twenty years in the making. The wait was worth it - these tales feature intricately detailed characters who blunder through life's dilemmas, big and small...The characters are so truly drawn, and the interior narratives they entertain are so brutally and sometimes hilariously honest, it is difficult to look away." -Barbara Lloyd McMichael, Bookmonger

"Gershow has a knack for fictional characters so keenly human that you expect any one of them to show up at your front door. Such is the case for those who populate her marvelous collection, Survival Tips. You want to invite these folks to your table with their shaggy edges and soupçon of cynicism. You want share in their dilemmas, which make you feel heartsick and yet profoundly relieved that you're not alone in this mad world." -Debra Gwartney, author of I Am a Stranger Here Myself

"Gershow's meticulously-crafted stories tenderly explore the strategies people use to survive the humiliations, fears, and ghosts of everyday life-within families and friendships, dating and marriage, and the relentless landscapes of memory. Against the backdrop of troubled cities in an even more troubled world, her deeply authentic characters navigate ways-neither neat nor heroic-to access control in constrained situations: blind dates and parent-teacher nights, baby showers and birthday parties, sweat lodges and funeral homes. In this poignant examination of human hypocrisy and devotion, Gershow writes with intelligence, humor, and empathy. I loved Survival Tips." -Corrina Wycoff, author of Damascus House and O Street

"Gershow's characters in Survival Tips range from wives and husbands to teenage girls, insecure teachers, unhappy mothers, women on blind dates, and women clinging to friendships past their expiration date. They struggle with communication as their relationships fall apart, or fail to start, or survive. In ten stories you won't forget, Gershow writes with a sharp eye for detail, impeccably wry wit, and unerring insight into the human heart. A stellar collection." -Jacqueline Doyle, author of The Missing Girl