“Whether depicting a troubled teenager with a crush on her high school English teacher, an immigrant from Guatemala who cleans rooms at the Plaza Hotel or a lonely beauty salon employee who human ties consist principally of those she imagines with fellow subway riders, Lucy Honig draws the characters in her first collection with deft, sympathetic strokes. Most of the book’s nine stories are set in or near Manhattan. In a series of interlocking stories entitled, The Truly Needy Honig brings a group of unrelated people—a social service organization director with a midlife crisis, her secretary, a Cambodian refugee who is haunted by her past, a homeless couple and actors filing a scene about life on the street—into uncanny relationships with one another. Along the way, she illustrates how the social boundaries that separate us are so often dependent on chance. Honig’s characters never degenerate into types or sink into self-pity, but soldier on, displaying courage in untenable situations and compassion where we might least expect to find it.”
—New York Times Book Review

“Distinctive not only for its beautifully precise prose and compelling characters, but also for its ability to see ‘the worst and still come back,’ as one character says. . . .There is much more to say about The Truly Needy and what it reveals about the cross-pollination of cultural values, the mishmash of the personal and the political, our desire to belong. [These stories] quietly, slyly, and convincingly remind us of the human potential for decency.”

—Chicago Tribune

“Nine stories, set mostly in New York City, make up Honig’s second collection, brimming with complex, vividly drawn characters teetering  precariously between alienation and empathy, displacement and communion, despair and perseverance. . . . Convincing detail and candid, insightful narrative draw the reader deep into the lives of these ordinary people and their sometimes extraordinary revelations. Honig permeates the collection with a quirky hopefulness in the resilience of these memorable characters and their unexpected moments of human connection—even as they struggle, with quiet heroism, to make their place in a modern world they can neither control nor explain.”

—Publishers Weekly