Herb's Pajamas: Stories

Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1998. First Edition. Hard Cover. Near Fine/Fine. 5x0x7. Signed by author. First edition. Signed by author without inscription on title page. Spine base lightly pushed, otherwise an excellent copy. 1998 Hard Cover. 199 pp. With her own special brand of delicate, elliptical, and humorous fiction, Abigail Thomas offers another extraordinary visit with people she knows far better than they know themselves. There's Walter, newly abandoned by his wife; there's Edith, a fiftyish virgin; there's Bunny, taking care of her mother and her mother's boyfriend; and there's Belle, whose married lover dies in the hallway wearing her dead husband Herb's pajama top. Blindly, they encounter one another in ways the reader recognizes are profound even as the characters themselves are unaware. The genius and the art in this collection derives from the possibility that these ships might actually find each other by daylight. If only these four could get together--they'd be so good for each other.