The stories in The Missing Kidney take place in New York City and feature vivid descriptions of the city and its people. The characters are quirky, tragic or ridiculous and sometimes all three at once. We meet we a terminally ill woman being tended by the mother she loves and hates in a cramped Brooklyn apartment; a naïve girl who writes heartfelt replies to inquiries from the readers of Parade Magazine; a weak little man who, after adjusting his tie and uttering “To win again, you must begin again” to himself picks up the phone to call a potential client; a young woman with a troubled marriage who forms a relationship with a crazy girl sitting next to her at a table in Starbucks; a ridiculous man making a display of himself as he kneels on the sidewalk, grieving for his girlfriend as a medley of New York characters commiserate; ambitious young professionals eagerly waiting for the old people in their apartment building to die; a young woman who dreads unhappiness the way some people dread cancer cries out to a naked transsexual gyrating behind a dirty wall of plexiglass at a peepshow on 42nd Street, “Why can’t I be happy? Why can’t I never be happy?”

Since many of the stories take place in in the 1970s and 1980s (enough to make the Strand put the collection in Historical Fiction until the author objected) the city depicted here is as untidy, disorganized and barely functional as the author and many of her friends were then, during a time when it did not seem like a bad place to be young, lost, and falling in and out of love. This is the New York that had been told by Gerald Ford to “Drop Dead,” as a famous newspaper headline put it, when every inch of the subway cars inside and out, were covered with graffiti and the lights would go out without warning when said subway cars were stopped in the tunnels. That New York is the natural habitat of Maxine Rosaler’s fiction, as the 1930s were the natural habitat of the stories of Bernard Malamud.

Self-delusion is a recurring theme, seen in the confused heroine of “Marigrace,” whose optimism in the face of a series of troubles that would rival those of Job and in “Happiness” where a young woman tries to convince herself that the man she finds sexually repulsive is the perfect fit for her perfectly ordered life. Stories in this collection have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Glimmer Train, The Green Mountains Review, The Southern Review, Witness, The Baltimore Review, Ascent, story South, Green Mountains Review and other literary magazines.