A Good Day for Seppuku: Stories

Braverman challenges mythological nuclear family roles in her memorable collection of new stories.

A thirteen-year-old girl must choose between her mother in Beverly Hills or her pot-growing father in the Allegheny Mountains. Dr. Bernie Roth and his wife Chloe reside in a grand hacienda in La Jolla. Their children are in college, and their disappointments are profound. But Bernie has his doctor’s bag of elixirs for the regrets of late middle age. Mrs. Barbara Stein, a high school teacher, looks like she’d sacrifice her life for Emily Dickinson’s honor. That’s camouflage-Mrs. Stein actually spends summers in the Sisyphean search for her prostitute daughter in Los Angeles.

These are some of the tales told in Kate Braverman’s audacious new story collection. These furious and often hilarious tableaus of American family life remind us of why she has been seducing readers ever since her debut novel Lithium for Medea shook the literary world nearly forty years ago.