With an impeccable eye for the beauty and simplicity of the everyday, Michael M. Brownstein’s PAPERBACKS & BAGUETTES is a delight. The book is built on passing moments, small but precious overlooked instances where nothing really happens and yet so much is contained within.

A collection of connected flash fiction stories about the staff and clientele of a neighborhood cafe-cum-bookstore.

“In his author profile, Brownstein states that he “writes about the moments we almost miss.” This captivating collection of interconnected flash fiction that captures the day-to-day incidents in a bookstore-cafe is made entirely of such moments: pregnant pauses in awkward conversations; the passing of the light across a countertop, as reliable and precise as a sundial; a mysterious forgotten notebook in which the pen marks “felt less like a note and more like a held breath.”

Brownstein excels at spotlighting the poetry of the everyday: the simple rhythms of the quotidian tasks of the cafe and bookshop staff, the customers who linger or pass by like ghosts, and, perhaps most importantly, the place itself—the most regular character of all. As Brownstein writes, “Sometimes it feels like the room exhales before anyone speaks. If you stay long enough, the room starts remembering you back.”

The stories are presented as though they’re poems—the sentences given space, the paragraphs separated like stanzas. Everything is slow and deliberate, designed to allow the stories to reveal themselves in stages. Much is made of light and shadow; a subtle change in the light becomes a dramatic event. One character, at least, shares the author’s enthusiasm for these tiny details: “She arrived while the light was still low, not her usual hour. When she did, it wasn’t for the coffee. She took out her sketchpad. The light was worth keeping.”

One story, “Cup Left Warm,” manages to create mystery and the tiniest amount of drama out of an abandoned coffee and an empty chair. Noticed but ignored by the barista, steam lifted from the cup and left a trace on the window while the crosswalk lights outside “changed and changed again.” By the close of this very short episode, the mystery remains unresolved: “By the time the steam was gone, the light had shifted on the floor, and the chair was still angled out.”

If there’s a criticism, it’s that the stories, when read one after another, eventually become quite repetitive. But this book is perhaps best dipped into and out of, as if it were a collection of captured moments rather than a linear narrative novella. Something to be revisited every now and then, in the same way a reader may return to a favored and familiar cafe.

With an impeccable eye for the beauty and simplicity of the everyday, Michael M. Brownstein’s PAPERBACKS & BAGUETTES is a delight. The book is built on passing moments, small but precious overlooked instances where nothing really happens and yet so much is contained within.”

~ Kent Lane for IndieReader