Two Recommendations

1. A Meaningful Life, by L.J. Davis (1971): This book has been adopted by the Brooklyn Fetishist movement as an early fable about gentrification (Jonathan Lethem prefaced the edition I read), but it's really just a dark, sometimes very funny story about a failed writer lamely battling against his own creeping nihilism.

2. For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, by Nathan Englander (1999): I'd had trouble with Englander's novel (The Ministry of Special Cases), but thought these short stories were pretty great. Unlike much of the inauthentic, maudlin garbage that passes for popular Jewish-American literature these days, these stories have a lot of, for lack of a better word, soul. Particularly good are "Reunion," which reminded me a bit of Cheever, "The Twenty-seventh Man," which Englander is now apparently adapting into a play, and especially "The Tumblers," which was one of the best short stories I've read in a long time.