The Topless Widow of Herkimer Street

This new collection by New York writer Jacob M. Appel features two brothers fighting over a collection of iron lungs, a elderly suburbanite campaigns for the right to sunbathe topless on her lawn, and a couple’s whose retirement home is accidentally delivered to the wrong address, where the current occupant refuses to return it. Each of the stories in The Topless Widow of Herkimer Street takes ordinary people to the brink of insanity—and, in one case, literally to the edge of the earth—forcing readers to grapple with the fine line that divides everyday life from the mad chaos always lurking in its shadows