Bryan Washington’s Lot, is a stunning debut collection of ten short stories. A love letter, of sorts, to Houston, each story speaks to the quiet, mundane moments of his characters’ lives.
Everyone around me could not seem to stop speaking about this book. Its size (very small) discouraged me. I thought, I’ll read it at some point, I have larger books to get through right now. But, I devoured Pachinko in less than a week, and found myself needing something short to cleanse my palate. Enter Lot. As much as the stories are about Houston (each one named for a neighbourhood or street in the city), Washington does not force his characters to become tour guides. I have no sense of what to expect should I ever find myself in Houston, but instead walked away from this book with fragments of an ordinary Houstonian’s memories.