Jonathan Blum: The Usual Uncertainties

Jonathan Blum wrote characters with open destinies, in stories with open endings, for his new book of short stories, The Usual Uncertainties. He says that uncertainties govern our lives—who can we love and who can also love us, how are we going to die—and he wished to write of uncertainty without irritability, to accept and embrace uncertainty, and to build characters with unresolved conflicts. In this varied lot of twelve stories each story creates its own world, and interior difficulties are written with clarity.