I pulled this off my shelf expecting to be enchanted. Instead, I finished it bored out of my mind. I've read this before and what's striking is none of the stories except one seemed familiar—apparently, I had easily forgotten them. Now, the one story, "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk" is still pretty fantastic, but coming after 200 pages of quippy protagonists who are fond of wordplay, and starring yet another quippy protagonist who is fond of wordplay, to be followed by yet one final quippy protagonist who is fond of wordplay and also accidentally murdered her friend's baby, even this stellar story caused my eyes to glaze over at one point. The cynical thing to say is, stories about white people who work in academia can't possibly be all that interesting. But if I were to try to dig for a deeper reason for its failure, I think it's that the book perfected writer's workshop tenets at the time: it's the epitomy of Carver-like minimalism. It's the "epiphany of the tiny moment, the power of the unsaid" writing writ ideal. In 1998, this book was considered a remarkable gem. By those rules, this book is an unprecedented triumph. Little did anyone at the time realize though, the rules they enforced and celebrated were arbitrary and not universal. One star.