SOURCE: Wilson, Robley. Review of Lust and Other Stories, by Susan Minot. Georgia Review 43, no. 4 (winter 1989): 829–30.

In the following review, Wilson examines the ultra-fictional qualities of Lust and Other Stories.

Among other things, Susan Minot's Lust and Other Stories reminds us that New York City is a fictional construct, a cardboard world of parochial celebrity assembled tab-and-slot by such artificers as the Hearst Empire, Condé Nast, and S. I. Newhouse, and exhibited to the real world by the likes of Esquire, Vanity Fair, and the new (alas) New Yorker. This being so, it seems to me that a lot of New York reviewers have handed Minot a bad rap, blaming her for producing a book less satisfying than her earlier Monkeys while failing to concede that a fiction set in, and concocted from, a world itself fictional is likely to be so different from a satisfactory reality as...