Slacks for Ella Funt

It seems like the “novel in stories” format has become more popular lately, and publishers don’t quite know how to sell them. Novels sell better than short stories, so they don’t want to label the books as stories. However, they don’t have the sustained narrative of a novel, even if characters do overlap from story to story. I don’t mind when a book is subtitled “a novel in stories” or something like that so at least you know what you’re getting. I don’t like when a publisher just calls it a novel.
For Adverbs, nothing on the cover says anything about it being stories rather than a cohesive novel. Since I’m not really a short story fan, I was disappointed as soon as I realized that it wasn’t a real novel. Handler has a lot of quirky wit, but the stories were just too short and spastic for me to really get into any of them and I usually couldn’t remember which characters were which when they came up again. Some of them did remind me a bit of Kelly Link, who does write short stories that I like, though hers tend to be longer.