spuytenduyvil

Lynda Schor’s stories are as dazzling as her readers have come to expect. To label them ‘black humor’ or describe them as ‘irreverent’ would be putting it mildly, and there is nothing mild about Schor’s take on the way we live now—our marriages, sex lives, obsessions and rites of passage. She is a master of satire, full of invention and wit, yet beneath the hilarious goings-on in her work runs a deep vein of melancholy.

 —Lynne Sharon Schwartz,

     author of Leaving Brooklyn, and Referred Pain

 

Hilarious, touching, and bitingly wicked. Popular culture, from Tarzan movies to couples counseling, from fitness gurus to Columbine-like massacres, are fodder for Schor’s keyboard. The mix works, showcasing a writer who is smart, sassy and bold.

   —Eleanor J. Bader, Lilith

 

As much as this collection proposes compelling politics, The Body Parts Shop is first and foremost a collection of stories—narratives—and good ones at that. Schor’s fiction glows with innovation. She does not shy away from frank sexual descriptions or biting satire.

   —Nathan Leslie, The Pedestal Magazine

 

Lynda Schor’s most recent collection of short stories, The Body Parts Shop, is filled with dazzling observations and witty prose.  In her best stories, Schor combines an off-the-wall sensibility with sharp prose, creating quirky and insightful tales.

   —Alex Starace, Rain Taxi

 

These stories are calculated assaults on much that we hold dear.  This gives them enhanced value. Malice as an artistic tool cannot be ignored, it can—as in this collection of freewheeling stories—be enjoyed. Highly recommended.

   —Bob Williams, The Compulsive Reader

 

The Body Parts Shop is complex, sometimes as plain as the nose on your face, sometimes wild enough to make your hair stand on end.

   —Kristin Thiel, American Book Review

 

I grew up devouring Lynda Schor’s stories in my teenage bedroom, hungry for life lessons on sex, love and other painfully delicious subjects. The Body Parts Shop continues her fine tradition, providing a hilarious user’s manual for American society by taking us behind the scenes of the staples of our TV culture. Whether it is school shootings, chimp actors, Barbie conventions, or hair replacement infomercials, Schor flips over the dark underbelly of America, exposing humorous—and often sexy—details that might have passed other, less gifted writers by.  A great read.

 —Dalton Conley,

      author of The Pecking Order, and Honkey

 

Savagely insightful, often hilarious, always beautifully crafted stories in this collection.

       —Marjorie Lipsyte, New Directions for Women

 

Stories about life, liberty and the pursuit of sexual happiness.  Ms. Schor’s fiction is literate, often witty and full of perceptive looks at relationships and the like. The characters are fun, and the author’s vision is that of a feminist with a grand awareness of the realities of males and females being at odds with each other.  Recommended.

  —Michael Calleri, Courier Express

 

Her characters seek to gratify their insatiable appetites—for sex, for food, for power over one another—with singleminded and often brutal zeal. Though she sometimes falls prey to the excesses of unbridled imagination, she skillfully combines genuine eroticism with didactic complexity in a consistently witty and refreshing way.

  —Robert Fiddler, Chicago Tribune

 

A new collection of short stories that are humorous, sexy, peculiar and familiar . . . and dazzling.

  —Ms. Magazine

 

Appetites is erotic, obscene, funny, sinister, cynical, compassionate, aggressive, totally eccentric and horribly universal. About half the stories are about this woman, a long-suffering mother named Lynda. She’s not mad, exactly—it’s just that you would never mistake her for anyone else, except maybe yourself.

 —Ellen Willis, The Village Voice

 

Appetites is funny, vivid, and expresses the hidden, un-Freudian feelings about everyday life and so-called love.

 —Barbara Garson

 

This book is recommended only to free, liberated women, who believe that freedom and unlimited license is theirs.

 —Ed Mintz, Brooklyn Daily Bulletin

 

Schor emphasizes the ridiculous, but she is a serious satirist of the transactions between the sexes.

 —Ann Barr Snitow

 

One of my favorite stories is Lynda Schor’s ‘The Rape.’

 —Doris Grumbach

 

Lynda Schor reminds me of Fellini more than any other artist I can think of. There is no escape from feeling for a writer like Lynda Schor. Not in distance. Not in analysis or abstraction. Just the powerful record of experience on experience. Fortunately for us, she has the courage, the energy, the completely original talent to write it all down.

 —Jane Lazarre

 

She turns over the rock of female experience and reveals the truth underneath.

   —Gloria Steinem

 

Appetites is a collection of 12 short stories that are variously funny, bitter, surreal, and exotic. Lynda Schor writes about sex as matter-of-factly as a harried housewife trying to make food stamps stretch at the local A & P.  Appetites is to be recommended for it’s honesty, it’s inventiveness, and above all for its meticulous attention to the details of a woman’s life. Lynda Schor is the first woman writer of short stories since Grace Paley to make art from such materials.

   —Screw

 

The stories in Appetites are brilliant. Appetites pushes the boundaries of conventional good taste, but it also presses the frontiers of the short story form in important new ways.

   —Carole Rosenthal

 

Few writers manage to be witty and hilarious at the same time, but Lynda Schor is. I was delighted by her stories which encourage me to expect the unexpected; there’s an astonishment on every page.

   —Nora Sayre