A Week at Surfside Beach: A Collection of Short Stories

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Mt. Michaels

Some of the best short story collections are built around a place rather than a plot, and the blue beach house at the center of A Week at Surfside Beach turns out to be one of the most quietly inspired structural choices in recent literary fiction. Pierce Koslosky Jr. spent fifteen years writing one story per fall beach trip, drawn from the real guest book entries left behind by strangers who briefly called the same house home. That origin gives the collection a texture no amount of pure invention could replicate.

Reading it produces the particular warmth of recognizing something true about the way people carry their lives into temporary spaces. A beach rental is one of those rare places where ordinary people become briefly visible to each other in ways their regular lives don't allow. They arrive with whatever they are dealing with, and the ocean, the rhythm of the tides, the strange intimacy of someone else's kitchen, does something to them. Koslosky understands that dynamic instinctively, and he uses the blue beach house as a kind of pressure chamber where the real substance of his characters' lives rises to the surface faster than it would anywhere else.

The range across sixteen stories is one of the collection's genuine pleasures. A six-year-old discovering the world of crabs and a retirement home escapee seeking something unnamed occupy the same imaginative space without any sense of strain, because what connects them is not circumstance but the specific quality of attention Koslosky brings to every stage of life. These are people with ordinary surfaces and complicated interiors, and he has the patience and precision to honor both.

His background is not that of a career literary writer, and somehow that shows in the best possible way. The stories feel observed rather than constructed, lived rather than assembled.

For anyone who has ever stood at the edge of the ocean and felt something shift inside them without being able to name it, this book knows exactly what that feeling is.