At 'The Dinner Party,' Stories That Walk The Line Between Tragedy And Comedy
The 11 stories in Joshua Ferris' new collection have all been published before, but they provide a fine showcase for his sly wit, proceeding from the ordinary to the uncomfortable and even bizarre.
Joshua Ferris has a bead on the insecurities that run beneath our quotidian exchanges, a shadowy subtext always threatening to spill into the open, like a sewage system overflowing with storm runoff. His typical protagonist is a man in his 30s who goes off the deep end in a darkly humorous way when his anxieties — usually about his wife or work — overwhelm him.
Ferris' first collection of short stories, is filled with men who become so. Many echo aspects of his novels — including the increasingly absurd veneer of normality that drives his send-up of office culture in, the unnamed malaise that permeates and the unsettling invasion of privacy and identity that infuses
