Some of Her Friends That Year

Maxine Chernoff’s spry, well-crafted stories illuminate the funny and disquieting subtleties of urban couples and families.

Highly regarded for her deft and humorous portrayals of the dark side of modern living, Maxine Chernoff’s latest collection is a droll, poetic field guide to the amusing, baffling, and endearing behavioral patterns of the urban human being. Chernoff fans will relish the new stories, and new readers will discover a wonderful assemblage of Chernoff’s likeable, unaffected, and contemplative characters. With the precision of a poet and the astuteness of a sociologist, Chernoff continues to establish herself as a master of the short story genre with this excellent collection.

Publication date: May 1, 2002

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 360 pages

ISBN: 9781566891479

Maxine Chernoff has published six books of fiction and eleven books of poetry. Her books with Coffee House Press are Bop (1986); American Heaven (1996); and Some of Her Friends That Year: New and Selected Stories (2002). The latter two books were nominated for the Bay Area Book Award. Her first book of stories, Bop, was reprinted in the Vintage Contemporary Fiction Series. With Paul Hoover, she received the 2009 PEN Translation Award for The Selected Poems of Friedrich Hoelderlin (Omnidawn Press). She coedits the long-running literary journal New American Writing and chairs the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University. She has read and taught writing in many countries including England, Belgium, Scotland, Australia, Russia, China, the Czech Republic, Brazil, and Kenya.

“[Chernoff's] stories do not rant fashionably, or show off, or whine: they sing, they celebrate life and death, and they enlarge their readers.” 

—The Chicago Sun-Times

“Like a superreal painter, Ms. Chernoff treats minutiae with the importance of the important, stylistically upgrading the trivial to the essential. . . . Absurdist but loving, measuring words with an eyedropper but not a minimalist, Ms. Chernoff is pyrotechnically funny.” 

—The New York Times Book Review