Silver's story collection honest

ALONE WITH YOU: Stories. By Marisa Silver. Simon & Schuster. 164 pages. $22.

Marisa Silver's literary style is a dichotomous blend of brutality and beauty. Whether writing novels, as in "No Direction Home" and "The God of War," or short story collections, as in "Babes in Paradise," Silver shows immense talent for navigating the hazards of human connections.

In her new collection, "Alone With You," Silver showcases a host of scarred characters navigating the tempests of life: addiction, brain tumors, heart disease, disability. Despite the macabre issues, her precise prose keeps one reading. The collection is a series of portraits of contemporary American life, but there is a universality to her writing that is interested in the collective suffering of humankind.

Silver is a realist. She has accepted that each person is ultimately on a solitary journey, and it seems these eight stories serve as proof and reminders of this. When the characters acknowledge this inherent loneliness, a space opens up in them for peace to reside.

"Alone With You" is heartbreakingly honest, and thus lends itself to reading in multiple sittings. It is her unsentimental style, however, coupled with her fresh language, that makes the collection so profound.