READERS' FAVORITE

RReviewed by Priya Mathew for Readers’ Favorite

 

People I Know by David Joseph is a collection of short fiction, some barely two pages long, each one built around a single person who passed through the narrator's life. Sal the repairman fixes everything, and along the way, becomes an unlikely philosopher too. A boy learns his neighbor is gay and cannot understand why it's supposed to be a scandal. A man buys his own gravesite years before he needs it, just for the view. David Joseph strings together these small portraits, and instead of reading like a traditional short story collection, this reads more like a scrapbook of strangers who mattered.

 

People I Know by David Joseph makes a convincing case for the short fiction form. What stood out most was how little the author relies on conventional plot to make these stories work. Each story hinges on a moment rather than an arc, and the pace suits that choice. The individual stories move fast without feeling incomplete, which is a harder trick than it sounds. The characters carry the whole book. The ones that stood out to me most were Pradeep, the soft-spoken 7-Eleven clerk who dies defending his uncle's honor and whose story stayed with me longest; Johnny, thrilled about the view from his and his wife's future graves, the funniest and saddest character in the entire collection, and easily my favorite of the bunch; and Bill, who turns a small indignity at self-checkout into a quiet act of defiance once cancer has rearranged his priorities. The themes running underneath, such as aging, class, quiet prejudice, and the loneliness inside ordinary routines, give the collection more weight. I picked up this book as someone who usually wants two hundred pages and a slow burn, and I left it convinced that David Joseph can do in four hundred words what most novelists need forty pages for.

 

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