Just Around the Corner: Romance en casserole

About the book

Fannie Hurst begins this collection in a luxurious hotel's manicure parlor, where Gertrude Sprunt's ability to flatter customers is both a professional skill and a source of personal complications. Other stories turn toward shops and crowded homes, including the shoe business and anxious household of Abe Ginsburg in 'Other People's Shoes.' The volume gives substantial attention to the speech, routines, and material circumstances through which affection must express itself. Its characters want pleasure and recognition, but wages, fatigue, social expectations, and family dependence shape the choices available to them. Across nine separate narratives, Hurst mixes comedy with emotional reversals, finding consequential dramas in situations that the prosperous passersby of the same streets might scarcely notice.

• Work and aspiration
• Family dependence
• Urban romance

Why read it

The detailed workplaces and vigorous dialogue ground the sentimental turns in recognizable economic and domestic pressures.

English text of the September 1914 Harper and Brothers collection of nine stories