“It isn’t solace Emily and Eva are seeking, but a way to transform their pain.” Amber Wheeler Bacon on Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” and “Tell Me a Riddle.”
“It’s the story of a self-centered young man who glimpses the future and finds it covered in flab.” Chuck Augello on T.C. Boyle’s “Thawing Out.”
“This sounds like a lot. And it is. But van den Berg presents it all with remarkable economy.” Elizabeth Mayer on Laura van den Berg’s “Hill of Hell.” Look for van den Berg’s new collection, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, from FSG in July.
“And though all the violence is ultimately, like most violence, senseless, it is not impossible to understand”: Leigh Camacho Rourks on Tom Franklin’s “Poachers.”
“What exactly did Carver do to make his character’s isolation so palpable that I felt it physically?” Amber Wheeler Bacon on Raymond Carver’s deeply affecting “Are You a Doctor?”
“I wondered if this was going to be too on the nose, if the students would feel provoked or become defensive.” George McCormick on teaching George Saunders’s “Home” in an Army town.
Join us for our twelfth-annual celebration of the short story, as we dedicate the month of May to short fiction.
“All these distractions and barriers have softened my writing discipline and made it less like bone, more like water—it flows into any shape it’s given.” Steven Wingate talks about how parenthood, contrary to popular wisdom, can be the best thing for your creativity.
“What is the end of the world to us? Is it the end of a marriage? The end of our families as we know them? Is it the splintering of a relationship with a loved one? Or is it the literal Rapture?”
Joshua Bodwell on the stories we tell, literary coincidences, and a correction to Best American Short Stories of the Century (with footnotes).
“Today, when I skim that first baker’s dozen I made a decade ago, my heart begins to race at the mere sight of some of the titles”: Joshua Bodwell offers his favorite reads during 2019 on the ten-year anniversary of his original “Baker’s Dozen” list.
“I love ‘The Great Silence’ because it is the odd bird out, or, to double down and use another cliché, the canary in the literary coal mine of the collection that warns us that we might all be doomed if we don’t listen.”
