Knockout Beauty and Other Afflictions
By Marina Rubin (Crowsnest Books) 

Flora and her longtime fiancé are stuck in a relationship she likens to a suitcase of unnecessary things, as in the Ukrainian proverb she quotes in the short story, “Good People Make Bad Couples”: “Too heavy to carry but oh, such a shame to drop.” In Marina Rubin’s sparkling new collection of stories, Knockout Beauty and Other Afflictions, Flora as well as most other women in the book are searching for love—and running from it, too.

While that makes for complicated lives, their adventures are high-spirited, colorful and alive to possibility. In “Valentino,” a clothes-loving optometrist named Iris, who is having an affair with a married man, buys piles of designer clothing. She sees endless possibilities as a “myriad of fabrics, textures, colors dovetailed with zippers, buttons and belts. Each hanger held a promise—an opening night at the Metropolitan Opera in a plunging Escada, a red Valentino at the fundraiser for glaucoma, a silk jumpsuit at an art opening in Chelsea.” In the end, most of the clothing is returned.

Rubin’s characters, many of them Jewish, are Americans and émigrés. Her writing is funny, dramatic, compassionate, rich with detail and original. Born in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, Rubin immigrated to the United States as a teenager in 1989 and grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., where many of the 17 stories take  place.

Her previous book, Stealing Cherries, was flash fiction, a collection of microstories that fit perfectly into a square of text. Here, her characters have more space to wrestle with their uncertainties, mysterious lovers, moments of loneliness and the serendipities of life and hope.

Sandee Brawarsky is a longtime columnist in the Jewish book world as well as an award-winning journalist, editor and author of several books, most recently of 212 Views of Central Park: Experiencing New York City’s Jewel From Every Angle.