No Longer and Not Yet

Stories of small-town life on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

The stories in No Longer and Not Yet look at the ways our lives are lived in the split seconds between what is no longer but is still not yet. Most take place on Manhattan's iconic Upper West Side, in the shops, hallways, and parks that reveal this well-known "big city" neighborhood for the tiny, even backwater village it more often resembles. An Upper West Sider herself, Joanna Clapps Herman draws her characters honestly yet tenderly, revealing them as much through how they move-the slope of a shoulder, a vocal inflection, the weight of a football-as by what they do, as though their bodies speak the truths they can't express.

Here, Hannah Arendt's ghost haunts the building where she once lived, a hawk carries the apparition of a lost loved one, a homeless woman becomes Demeter. Small moments and intimacies of life weave together to form a bigger picture: the squeak of the hotel bed, a leaf on a saucer, the quality of light in the therapist's office, the doorman's familiar jokes, the open cupboards, the unspoken words. These stories show that, although we may think of ourselves in larger mythic narratives, our days are set in the terrain that is the opposite of the vast.