The short story is here to stay, even if publishers complain that 'they don't sell', and Almond's is a good example of a short story collection which should sell. Rather than go for the box of tricks 'look at my range' approach to short stories in his debut, there is one (albeit broad) theme running throughout: sexual relationships. And being a young, educated, American male, Almond concentrates for the most part on the passions, foibles and confusions of his contemporaries. Commercial stories with a literary underside, whose flavour is best brought out by lines like the following in the tale of a young democrat's lust for a republican woman: She vamped gamely even as her eyelids drooped, licked her lovely incisor and urged me forward. How could it possibly matter that she was against gun control?
