I’ve been following Dave Newman’s work for years. His depictions of America’s working class are stark in their honesty without ever pandering or slipping into schmaltz. The characters that inhabit his world are always a bad break away from losing everything, whether that break is cosmic or (often) self-inflicted. In She Throws Herself Forward to Stop the Fall, school is the commonality as Newman’s cast, mostly women, tries to cobble together better lives for themselves. One ekes out a meager living teaching adjunct college sections, another works food service while taking night classes, yet another continues to hope her boyfriend has turned his life around and that this will be the last time she has to pick him up at a crack house in the middle of the night.

Newman’s juxtaposition of tragedy and humor incorporates so many small details and big swings that each short story is a self-contained world, gripping and convincing. I keep reviewing his stuff here because he’s such a great writer, one I think Razorcake readers would dig. You know what? Fuck that—one that readers would dig, period. This one’s a banger, a heartbreaker laced with the odd beam of pure sunlight. –Michael T. Fournier

this review first appeared in Razorcake at https://razorcake.org/she-throws-herself-forward-to-stop-the-fall-by-dave-newman-192-pgs/