Amy Hempel

A world in miniature

by Keith Taylor

posted 10/16/2008

Back in the 1980s, Amy Hempel became famous for one extraordinary short story, “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried.” In it the narrator visits a friend who is in the last stages of cancer, and the two women simply talk, or try to find a way to talk, about almost anything but the disease, until the narrator is overwhelmed by her inability to find “the

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