The discourse about reading fiction during the pandemic has followed two broad tracks: There are those who take comfort in the activity, and those who have found reading impossibly difficult. DANCE ON SATURDAY (Small Beer Press, 318 pp., paper, $17) is Elwin Cotman’s third collection of short fiction. We tend to call fiction “short” when it’s not a novel, but the six stories in “Dance on Saturday” are long, deep and rich, each so thoroughly engrossing and distinctive in its style that I had to take long breaks between them. Rooted in contemporary cityscapes and mythic pasts, with affects ranging from melancholy optimism to humor to horror, this collection is a sensuous, polyphonic feast. The title piece — and the longest, accounting for about a third of the book — packs in a novel’s worth of complexity.

Source: New York Times August 27, 2020 09:00 UTC