In Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories, Edith Pearlman grabs the reader’s attention and never lets it go. In this review, Andrea Nolan looks at some of Pearlman’s first lines and examines how her stories are united through character, theme, and place.

In 1990, Stephanie Vaughn published her debut collection of short fiction, Sweet Talk. Critical reception was overwhelmingly positive. A reviewer for Mother Jones Magazine wrote, “There is not a weak story in Sweet Talk and few are less than spectacular … Hers is a wise, touching, extraordinary voice—the sort rarely achieved at the end of a gifted career, let alone at the beginning.” To date, Vaughn’s first book has also been the only one her adoring fans have seen.

Tyler McMahon loves short stories but worries that collections might be the worst thing to have happened to the genre. However, books like Alan Heathcock’s Volt renew his faith in the collection as an art form of its own, one that makes its stories inseparable from one another—greater even than the sum of their parts.

On Wednesday, Anthony Doerr was awarded the 2010 Story Prize for his collection Memory Wall. The ceremony also honored two finalists, Yiyun Li and Suzanne Rivecca. Reports the Story Prize’s blog:
Anthony Doerr, for instance, in answer to a question about the preponderance of older women in Memory Wall, talked about how his grandmother, [...]

How often does it happen? Once or twice, maybe? You’re in a bookstore, you’re at the library, drifting among the stacks, your eye glazed over not with boredom but indecision, because you simply cannot decide what it is you want to read next. Reading something next, that’s the easy part, particularly if you’re one of [...]

Each week we give away several free copies of a featured novel or story collection as part of our Book-of-the-Week program. Last week we featured Picking Bones From Ash, by Marie Mutsuki Mockett, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Lucy Biederman, Thea Burgess, and Brian Boyle. Congratulations! Each will receive a copy of the [...]

There are no zombies or vampires in Brad Watson’s new collection, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives (W.W. Norton, 2010), but there are plenty of folks who act like they’re either dead or from another planet. And, yes, many of Watson’s characters are “aliens”—not green creatures with large heads, but alienated, isolated. They are people who wander through life without an anchor, who don’t feel the pull of gravity.

Yiyun Li (Gold Boy, Emerald Girl) discusses with Angela Watrous what it means to be an American writer; the elusive process of revision; the art of transforming stories into screenplays; and the act of talking aloud to famous dead writers.

Andrew Porter is the author of The Theory of Light and Matter, which won the 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and was recently republished by Vintage. Each one of these critically acclaimed stories is beautifully paced and plotted–a veritable nesting box–and full of lovely sentences you’ll want to read aloud just for the pleasure of it.

In this interview, Porter discusses how crafting stories is like editing film; what particular advantages peripheral narrators can afford; and why it’s “completely surreal” to hear actors read from your work.

“I imagine the seasonally unspecified stories in Laura van den Berg’s What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us must be set in spring because spring is a time that makes me feel young, young as girls and in as much danger. And then there’s always this odd moment of realization that I am young and a girl and in some dangers. I’m still in too-close contact with boys I once loved, still prone to crying in public, still not aware of the dynamic personal lives of adults. Spring in the Midwest is about babies and hope and vitality, but it’s also about knowing that eventually a late frost is going to swing in out of no place and kill everything you haven’t collected in the shed. And I wanted the people in these stories locked up safe.”