Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Herb's Pajamas: Stories
    Unavailable
    Herb's Pajamas: Stories
    Unavailable
    Herb's Pajamas: Stories
    Ebook164 pages3 hours

    Herb's Pajamas: Stories

    By Abigail Thomas

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    These linked stories of four lonely city dwellers by the New York Times–bestselling author of A Three Dog Life come together in this “gem” (The Village Voice).
     
    “A lonely hermit, a dead cobbler, a teenage runaway, and a 54-year-old virgin star in this . . . collection of poignant short stories set on New York’s Upper West Side. In concise, deft prose, Thomas interweaves tales of ordinary people coping with urban malaise. The first piece describes Walter, a sci-fi writer, pondering the value of his existence after his wife walks out. After Walter is cheered up by Mexican rooftop singers, the narrative shifts to his troubled neighbor, Edith. An overweight, sexually frustrated woman, Edith’s unusual antics include pocketing her dying mother’s jewelry and leaving flowers in the trash for a homeless woman. As Edith and Walter come to grips with their loneliness, the chaotic New York milieu is a vital force invigorating their lives. After a 14-year old runs away in search of her older sister in the penultimate story, the collection ends with an adulteress struggling to move her dead lover’s body, still clad in her husband’s pajamas. In portraying each of her four characters, Thomas captures the subtle details of city life with elegance, flair, wit, and comic timing.” —Boston Review
     
    “Thomas has a way with details that makes for endings as bittersweet as her beginnings.” —Publishers Weekly
     
    “An entertaining, cohesive, and well-written volume.” —Booklist
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJun 17, 2013
    ISBN9781565127494
    Unavailable
    Herb's Pajamas: Stories
    Author

    Abigail Thomas

    Abigail Thomas worked as both a book editor and book agent before writing her first short story collection, Getting Over Tom. Her second and third books An Actual Life, and Herb's Pajamas, were works of fiction. Her memoir, A Three Dog Life, was named one of the Best Books of the Year by The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. She is also author of the memoirs Safekeeping, Thinking About Memoir, and What Comes Next and How to Like It.  The daughter of renowned science writer Lewis Thomas (The Lives of a Cell), Thomas has four children, twelve grandchildren, and two great grandchildren. She lives in Woodstock, New York, with her dogs.

    Related to Herb's Pajamas

    Related ebooks

    Short Stories For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Return To The MFA

      Aug 12, 2020

      I REMEMBER a story I last workshopped in my MFA program. It’s a story about Soma, a call-center agent in India who has to ignore daily encounters with American racism. In my story’s climax she has to empathize with a white woman accusing Indians of b

      12 min read

    • Article

      EDITOR’S Note

      Jun 16, 2021

      CERTAIN BOOKS, IF WE ARE LUCKY TO ENCOUNTER THEM at just the right moment, exert a kind of emotional-intellectual-gravitational force on us. Time slows down; the mind opens up. Maybe this is what we mean when we say a work of art “speaks” to us. I wa

      2 min read

    • Article

      What Is the Value of Being Haunted? The Millions Interviews Randon Billings Noble

      Aug 15, 2019

      Essays are more important than ever! I mean writing that slows down, deliberates, ruminates, and examines its own beliefs even as it states them. The post What Is the Value of Being Haunted? The Millions Interviews Randon Billings Noble appeared firs

      7 min read

    • Article

      Kate Bowler

      Feb 5, 2018

      The Duke professor talks about her new memoir, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved, and parenting with an incurable cancer diagnosis

      2 min read

    • Article

      Sarah M. Broom

      Aug 14, 2019

      Sarah M. Broom
      3 min read

    • Article

      Elephant In The City Of Blind

      Feb 6, 2020

      Elephant In The City Of Blind
      5 min read

    • Article

      Year in Reading: Jennifer Acker

      Dec 11, 2020

      I first read The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard in college in a fiction workshop taught by Anita Shreve, who once, with the best of intentions, lectured our class on the “banality” of the subjects we chose to write about, and who, when her most

      3 min read

    • Article

      Mary Oliver

      Feb 4, 2019

      IF YOU KNOW ONLY ONE LINE OF MARY OLIVER’S POETRY, IT IS likely a question she posed, one that sums up the infectious wonder that ran through her verse like veins through a leaf. “Tell me,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet wrote in “The Summer Day,” “

      1 min read

    • Article

      Page One

      Dec 14, 2022

      “Ramón climbed up the Coca-Cola billboard near the highway one Monday.” How to Turn Into a Bird (Tin House, December 2022) by María José Ferrada, translated from the Spanish by Elizabeth Bryer. Fifty-fifth book, second novel. Agent: Vito D’Onghia. Ed

      2 min read

    • Article

      Learning To Fly

      Apr 13, 2022

      Learning To Fly
      13 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Bryan Washington

      Dec 3, 2018

      1. This year, I read a lot on my phone. That’s a habit I’ve picked up from working gigs where you stand a bunch (watching kids on a swingset, watching adult children park their cars). Some folks don’t vibe with that, but those folks don’t pay my bill

      4 min read

    • Article

      Starting Over Is What’s Hard: The Millions Interviews Mary Laura Philpott

      May 15, 2019

      It’s frighteningly easy to settle into being someone you don’t want to be, because that settling can happen so gradually. The post Starting Over Is What’s Hard: The Millions Interviews Mary Laura Philpott appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Jenny Offill Exerts Herself

      Jan 15, 2020

      I don’t love the language that’s available to talk about this stuff. If you’re not drawn to earnestness, how do you make yourself a more engaged person? The post Jenny Offill Exerts Herself appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      On Mary Oliver and Resisting Poems of Gladness

      Jan 22, 2019

      Was it possible that, despite my best efforts to resist proscriptive poetry doctrines, somewhere along the line I’d internalized the unspoken tenet that accessible poems of praise and wonder are less worthy of real attention? The post On Mary Oliver

      5 min read

    • Article

      CRAFT Therapy

      Feb 17, 2021

      CRAFT Therapy
      12 min read

    • Article

      Lost In The Weeds

      Aug 18, 2021

      BEFORE the pandemic, every spring I ventured outside and jerked up all the new dandelion, blackberry vines, and globes of white clover that dared invade our yard. Those trespassers encroached on more “worthy” species—the precious tufts of fescue, my

      6 min read

    • Article

      What Grief Tastes Like

      Apr 21, 2021

      What Grief Tastes Like
      5 min read

    Reviews for Herb's Pajamas

    3/5

    8 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      I loved the author's memoir about her husband's long illness and death, but this was underwhelming, in the nothing happens, for a very long time, fashion.