Speaking of revenge stories ... I loved this one. It was desperately sad with a long future of sadness ahead, regardless of the triumph our main character ended with. This is a story of a girl who loses her father to the selfish people of a village eager to buy wares from a Jewish man, but equally eager to see him tortured. It happened on the say-so of a wandering gentile, who was as "grasping and vindictive" as he proclaimed the Jewish people to be.

“I will kill them,” I told my uncle. My voice was steady and I was quite sincere. “I will surround that town with death. I will wrap death around their hearts, and I will rip them apart.

“I will kill them all. Every one.”

Fadiman has an interesting turn of phrase that is overshadowed by a general sense of haughtiness. There's entirely too much pearl-clutching over petty things (the horror she feels about someone who organizes their books by color and shape is overwrought). After finishing the second essay "The Joy of Sesquipedalians", I think I have discovered the disconnect between her love of reading, books and words and my own: she tends to look wistfully backward onto the "classics" and regards newer things with half-hearted enthusiasm at best. Her feelings on new linguistic changes and vocabulary brought to us with internet usage ("positively mephitic") grind uncomfortably against my own.

Regardless, she did have one particular point that I could vibe with:

It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner.

Through her interest in polar exploration, I did learn that if you should get your hand stuck to cold metal, you should pee on it. So this wasn't a complete loss.

I’m on my second cup of Earl Grey when I ask, “What in the entire fuck is actually going on?”

lovely, viscerally descriptive writing.

This was a fun read. Really enjoyed the catty, passive-aggressive (and then just straight up aggressive) email exchange in "The Wainscoting War" between a newly moved in trophy wife and her older townhouse neighbor.

There are two stars of this collection, the first of which was "Dumpster Diving With the Stars". It features a genre-savvy writer who has only one cult classic novel to her name, published 15 years prior; she joins a reality tv show at a friend's behest. The finale event for the contestants ties in with a dead background character from "Wainscoting War" - I love when short story collections make it obvious that there's a cohesion to their world.

The second star of my heart was "Dead Doorman", which started off as a bit eerie in tone. You worry for the nameless narrator, a woman with the distant husband and the overbearing mother-in-law who didn't like anyone to get "too comfortable" in her house. But each neutral statement she makes about her life builds on one another until you realize that maybe she's the one you need to worry about. ˡᵒᵛᵉ ᵐᵉ ˢᵒᵐᵉ ˢᶜᵃʳʸ ˡᵃᵈᶦᵉˢ