Cockfosters
Helen Simpson
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
<b>A wickedly wry, tender new collection from one of our finest internationally acclaimed short story writers.</b> <br>Nine virtuoso stories that take up the preoccupations and fixations of time's passing and of middle age and that take us from today's London and Berlin to the wild west of the USA and the wilder shores of Mother Russia; stories finely balanced between devastation and optimism.<br> In the title story, long-ago school pals take the London Underground to the end of the Piccadilly line&#8212;Cockfosters Station&#8212;to retrieve a lost pair of newly prescribed bifocals ("The worst thing about needing glasses is the bumbling," says Julie. "I've turned into a bumbler overnight. Me! I run marathons!"); each station stop prompting reflections on their shared past, present, and possible futures . . . In "Erewhon," a gender-role flip: after having sex with his wife, who has turned over and instantly fallen asleep, a man lies awake fretting about his body shape, his...</br></br>