Mary Otis’s powerful and elegantly crafted collection combines the hilarious with the tragic. Her stories radiate intelligence, compassion, and humor.
These partially linked stories follow the strange and comic adventures of characters united by longing and misplaced passions: a lonely teenage girl falls in love with an older, married neighbor; a boy learns the fine art of shoplifting from his father; a schoolteacher gets fired for teaching time incorrectly; and a young woman receives guidance from a drunk therapist. Quirky and funny, yet deeply human, the stories in Yes, Yes, Cherries seek answers to the questions of whom we love and why, how we search for love, lose it, or find it—sometimes at the last moment and in the most unlikely places.
“Sadness and humor sidle up to each other, evocative of the delicate balance of melancholy and wit found in Lorrie Moore's stories.”
—The New York Times
“These are invisible people in pockets of the city that go under-chronicled… What ties them all together is Otis’ strong voice, which is jittery and electric, unsettling like the Santa Ana winds… bringing the same eye for detail from one story to the next.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Mary Otis sees things from the odd angle, which is the literary one. It makes her stories true-to-life, funny, brave, and amazing.”
—Lorrie Moore, Author of Birds of America and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital
“An assured collection, linked occasionally by character but always by Otis’s remarkable voice, her gift for the luminous detail, the surprising turn, the transcendent finish.”
—Karen Joy Fowler, Author of The Jane Austen Book Club and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
“Yes, Yes, Cherries offers an intriguing batch of imperfect characters and unstable conditions. Otis has a sharp eye for people’s habits. She knows how to draw flawed relationships. And under her guidance, hearing about the agony of lust and love never gets old.”
—Esquire
“At one point I was thinking about Play It As It Lays, the Joan Didion novel, and one of my favorite books about LA. Otis has captured some of that same edge-of-the-world mystery, that odd feeling of reading about the seemingly invisible parts of life, where details become hugely important. This is all the result of her mastery of observation, of course.”
—Chris Wells, The Secret City
“Otis’ keenly written debut short story collection features characters caught up in longing, indiscretion, and unrequited desire. Otis’ tales are clever and concise… The Allison stories are the most endearing, since her journey is as unexpected as so-called everyday life.”
—Booklist
“Shame, spurned love, and desire run through the sometimes-connected stories in Otis’s adroit debut collection… sharply drawn and notable for its depth.”
—Publisher’s Weekly
“Mary Otis writes with empathy and a cockeyed wit.”
—Los Angeles Magazine
“The characters in these stories, whether a teacher who teaches time incorrectly, a policeman-philosopher at the scene of an accident, or a young girl who wears a frosted blond wig and knocks on her neighbor’s door to sell ‘what you need to buy’ show us what it means to be human. That’s all a reader asks of any story. That is, of course, everything.”
—Ellen Slezak, Author of Last Year’s Jesus and All These Girls
“Yes, Yes, Cherries skates through the margins of American dreaming, its great poignancy balanced on heartbreaking absurdities. Mary Otis offers a dead-on candor spliced through with perceptual leaps, her realism glinting with near-psychotropic sparks. An irresistible collection, Yes, Yes, Cherries beautifully enacts the poetry of bewilderment.”
—Nancy Reisman, Author of The First Desire and Tromp L’oeil: A Novel