Acclaim for Joshua Furst's collection of stories, Short People

"[Furst] captures the utter joy and wonder of the formative years, making real the awe we long ago forgot, along with time's bleak and nefarious sides . . . Furst makes it all explicit - the cruelty, the astonishment, the treachery, the rapture - and in doing so creates a thoughtful if disturbing portrait of with it means to be a child. Or more to the point, what it means to be human."

-Los Angeles Times

"[A] charged debut collection . . . Furst's attention to his characters, his allegiance, remains constant. There's real humor here, and terror, and an enormous sense of all that can be lost."

-Lynna Williams, Chicago Tribune

"A remarkable collection of stories, a wide-ranging, unsentimental exploration of the lost worlds of childhood and adolescence, where the angles are all slightly askew and the logic is more rigorous than our own. These are scary, funny, brilliantly observed narratives; Joshua Furst is a terrific writer."

-Jay McInerney

"A near-magical collection . . . This is a book that will stay with you for a long, long time."

-Jeff Guinn, Miami Herald

"Joshua Furst writes about the world of young people with a complexity and lack of sentimentality that is rarely, if ever, explored in American Literature. To read these stories is to enter into some dark worlds, but the magic here lies in Furst's affection for his characters and, moreover, his almost parental desire for them to turn out okay. Short People is, at its core, about caring, and no one has take more care than the author himself"

--Meghan Daum

"Sharp, funny, generous-minded . . . Joshua Furst has an abiding interest in what kids do, and what they're thinking when they do it."

-Chris Lehmann, The Washington Post Book World