In 1994, while pursuing a master's in fine arts at Columbia University, Foster began coordinating literary readings at the KGB Bar, so named because the lower Manhattan tavern once housed a group that supposedly fronted for the Communist Party. After four years and countless readings, Foster chose twenty-eight stories to include in The KGB Bar Reader, which was published last year. Remarkably, many of the stories Foster picked are written by this decade's most successful and influential writers, including the recipient of this year's Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Michael Cunningham. Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that Foster's own stories are as unusual and memorable as they are. It's not just Foster's perspective from beyond the pale that marks these stories as unique.
Foster plays with form, too.
I'm Likely to Get aren't likely to be considered stories at all, in the most traditional sense of the word. Many of them are sketches and are intentionally oblique, and some simply sate a reader's curiosity about what it would be like to be in the situations Foster describes. I'm Likely to Get revolve around a recently separated couple, John and Mary. This first story proves that John and Mary probably shouldn't have been together in the first place, and that Mary had been disinterested at best. In the second story, told from Mary's point of view, she returns to New York after publishing a scathing account of her relationship with John in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.