[With] The Apathetic Bookie Joint Daniel Fuchs has at last made a comeback. It is a most welcome event.

For with this collection of his short fiction a prodigal returns. His youthful ambition had been to record the trapped and alienated lives of his native Brooklyn…. A peculiar blend of irony with good humour gave his writing a flavour all its own. The move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1937, it now turns out, did nothing to queer the tone. If anything, it was enriched.

Stories like "The Golden West" (1954), or "Twilight in Southern California" (1953), or the more recent "Triplicate", will surely rank with The Day of the Locust among the major fictional expressions of Hollywood. With this comprehensive view of his short stories and sketches over five decades, Daniel Fuchs emerges as a master of the undercutting rhythms and idioms of Jewish-American humour….

Like Chekhov (his ultimate...