An Amateur's Guide to the Night

As Mary Robison's third book, An Amateur's Guide to the Night stands as an exemplar of her beloved narrative style: purposeful, clipped, and devastating in its restraint. The Los Angeles Times said of the thirteen stories contained within: "As narrative, the stories are inconclusive; as commentaries on the way Americans live now, they're absolute and final." Reflecting on the life of disaffected youth, the stories in An Amateur's Guide to the Night speculate on how they manage to remain deferent towards the rest of society--and documenting how spectacularly they often fail.