While It Lasts: Stories

Winner of the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence

In Scott Nadelson’s work, there is an extraordinary variety of characters, settings, and situations. And while each story satisfies individually, these stories together accomplish the difficult feat of being a different artifact taken as a whole, which is what great collections do. This is reading to look forward to.

Antonya Nelson, author of Funny Once and judge of the 2022 Jordan Prize

A binge-worthy assembly of stories, but unlike what the title says, the sensation and pleasure of reading them is not just while the book lasts, but long afterward. Crisscrossing centuries, continents, and an array of characters, every story is immediately immersible; the open endings sometimes stab, other times ring with the resonance and echo of history or memory. Nadelson is a short form master and magician. 

Cris Mazza, author of Charlatan: New and Selected Stories

While It Lasts, Scott Nadelson’s transporting new collection of short fiction, illuminates the close and volatile bond between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Historical figures like Mark Rothko, Clara Lemlich Shavelson, and Daniel Mendoza tangle with the same questions of purpose that the rest of us do, while ordinary fictional characters find opportunities for profound vulnerability or soaring transcendence. And, as the title suggests, all of this is momentary. Fame, love, home, certainty, life itself—what comes goes, what goes comes, and nobody is damned or saved forever. There is serious wisdom here, and great storytelling, too.

David Ebenbach, author of How to Mars and The Guy We Didn’t Invite to the Orgy and other stories

Some of the characters in Scott Nadelson’s generous and wide-ranging sixth story collection are based on famous people: the artist Mark Rothko, the musician Arnold Schoenberg, the union organizer Clara Lemlich, the guitarist John Fahey, and the 18th Century London prizefighter Daniel Mendoza. All are captured in private, beautifully imagined moments of their lives, either before, or after, their public transformations. The remaining stories are about the rest of us, the well-intentioned, misguided, and often foolish. A woman gets stuck on a rock off the Oregon coast, a young man pretends to be gay in order to hang out with the married woman he’s attracted to, an auditor is too slow to realize he’s being blackmailed. Written with insight, empathy, and intelligence, these are stories to treasure.

Molly Giles, author of Wife with Knife

Scott Nadelson’s While It Lasts is a reminder of the power of the short story to navigate all those hard-to-reach places in the ongoing mystery we call human experience. Beneath their luminous surfaces, these stories thrum with energy, a sense of forward motion and escalation, of the truth rising to meet the world. Be prepared to emerge, dazzled and amazed, from each—and to recommend this book to everyone you know.

Anthony Varallo, author of The Lines