The Washington Post

Certain authors have such mastery over the short story form that you never forget the first time you read their work. Lorrie Moore, for example. Jim Shepard. Deborah Eisenberg.

Add to that impressive list Sarah Shun-lien Bynum with her new collection, “Likes,” as evidence.

“Likes” is a short-story collection you should read slowly, but it’s so good, each story at such a high-wire level, that you’ll wind up tearing through it and wishing for more.

The New York Times Book Review

Likes, by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, shows an impressive control of language and a capacious sense of how much a short story can do.

The adjectives that readers often attach to Bynum’s work — “enchanting,” “charming,” “precise” — are accurate, but can give the impression that she specializes in dollhouse miniatures, masterfully crafted but bloodless. Her skills and her sensibility are deeper and darker than that. The sentences are indeed meticulous, but never for their own sake; they bring to life characters who possess rich inner lives even when navigating moments that feel dreamily sinister or otherworldly. To borrow Marianne Moore’s description of poems as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” Bynum offers her reader inventively landscaped, beautifully manicured gardens teeming with rewardingly warty toads.

Publishers Weekly, starred review

Bynum’s sparkling, transcendent latest (after Ms. Hempel Chronicles) follows the big decisions and minutiae that make up the messy lives of her characters. Each story is delicate and dazzling in its own way—this is the rare collection where each entry is as good as the one that came before it. The title story follows a father’s desperate attempts to understand his young daughter through the lens of her pink-hued Instagram feed. In “The Bears,” a writer attends a rural residency while recovering from the trauma of a miscarriage; there, she doesn’t write, and on her long walks becomes obsessed with a gorgeous nearby house and its mysterious occupant. “Julia and Sunny” chronicles the dissolution of a once-solid marriage from the biased perspective of the couple’s closest friends, another married couple. And in the sublime “Many a Little Makes,” three school friends explore their differences in race, body type, and varying degrees of sexual experimentation. The stories hum with thrilling detail and are touched here and there by small hints of magic, such as a young girl imagining a stranger at a party will give her a gift (“A surprise that is small and very delicate, like a music box, but when you open it, it goes down and down, like a rabbit hole, and inside there is everything”). With the exuberance of the best Elizabeth McCracken stories and the insights of Tessa Hadley, these tales are at once gorgeously rendered and empathetic. This has the feel of an instant classic.

WIRED’s Ultimate Summer Reading List

If there’s one thing recent months have made everyone keenly aware of, it’s the space between people. The nine stories in Likes, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s third book and first collection of short fiction, map this terrain, each exploring the interstices of a different relationship. The intimacy of staring through a neighbor’s windows. The strangeness of visiting a school friend’s home for the first time (different snacks, new smells!). The challenge of decoding your tween daughter’s posts on Instagram. The way you can look at a face you know well and still see something unrecognizable. “A paradox of growing so close to another person was the doubt that you could impart to them the very closeness that you felt,” Bynum writes in “The Young Wife’s Tale.” Despite her frequent use of the language of myths and fairytales, Bynum’s focus is deceptively ordinary. Time and again, her characters reckon with how—and if—you can ever really close the gap between yourself and someone else. At a time when almost all of our meaningful interactions happen at a six-foot distance, or are mediated by a screen, Likes is a comforting reminder that relationships are often contradictory. You can feel kinship with someone far away, just as you can lie in bed next to a loved one and feel alone.

Kirkus Reviews, starred review

A collection of stories that find politics gone crazy, girls and women navigating their ways through social media minefields, and identity refracted through celebrity culture.

The title story generated considerable attention when it appeared in the New Yorker in 2017. On one level it's about a father’s attempts to decipher the life of his 12-year-old daughter through her Instagram posts, some of which appear to be suggestive, or maybe that’s just to him. Here's one: “New post: a pair of lips, shining wetly.” Another: “New Instagram post: a peeled-off pair of ballet tights, splayed on the white tiles of a bathroom floor.” Just what is it she’s trying to communicate, and with whom? When he tries to talk with his daughter, she's often silent or, perhaps worse, complains that she has no friends. Beyond the father-daughter relationship, the story, set against a backdrop of a dysfunctional culture whose presidential election defies understanding, captures a more general malaise. So many of the stories here are about trying to understand, failing to connect, and interpreting the signs from a relentless barrage of media. The stories evoke myth (“The Erlking”), fairy tales (“Young Wife’s Tale”), and science fiction (“The Burglar”), with dreamlike reveries that find protagonists not quite clear on what they're experiencing, let alone what it means. Throughout, Bynum combines a firm command of tone (often warm, even when dark) with precise detail. In "Many a Little Makes," the longest story and the collection’s centerpiece, a woman named Mari gets a long text from an old friend and finds it reviving all sorts of memories of girls on the cusp of adolescence, how a few years found them changing so dramatically in different ways, how boys and parents complicated the relationship. Bynum's characters struggle to determine who they are, how they are, and how they were, in a distant time before smartphones and cyber-media.

As clean prose dissects messy lives, these stories combine an empathetic heart with acute understanding.