Every so often a book comes along of such a standard that the efforts of reviewers and publishing house spruikers are rendered inadequate. The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel is an example. Her perfectly crafted sentences seem to flow one into another, from scene to scene and story to story, as if there were no effort involved in their construction at all. The illusion is so great and so potent that it is possible to read well into the night and through the morning, or to completely miss ones train or tram stop. And Hempel is an original in the truest sense of the word, because she writes like no one else. Here is a writer channeling her own version of literary minimalism, unburdened by Carver’s fatalism, the manipulations of Tobias Wolfe, or the machismo of Richard Ford. Take a representative sentence from Weekend: ‘And when the men kissed the women good night, and their weekend whiskers scratched the women’s cheeks, the women did not think shave, they thought: stay.’ I have been pushing this book onto friends for years, and the long overdue local release is a must for lovers of literature.