Stories We Love: “The Bees,” by Dan Chaon
by Shawn Andrew Mitchell
“‘The Bees’ is one hundred percent, additive-free parental nightmare fuel, from the inexplicable screams to the accidental and intentional harms to the final body bags.”
“‘The Bees’ is one hundred percent, additive-free parental nightmare fuel, from the inexplicable screams to the accidental and intentional harms to the final body bags.”
“Re-reading this story now, after the terrible years of Covid, in the shadow of the ghastly war in Ukraine, as famine stalks Africa and the Middle East, one understands the dream of escape.” Lee Thomas on Tamas Dobozy’s story “The Restoration of the Villa Where Tibor Kálmán Once Lived.”
“In Schwartz’s fiction, as in life, it is often the unspoken or withheld that holds power”: Ellen Prentiss Campbell on the story “Stranger,” by Steven Schwartz, from his collection Madagascar.
“Maybe how we choose to tell the stories of our pain can allow us to turn that pain into something greater, something necessary, something that might ease the pain of others.” Karin Killian on narrative technique in Lauren Groff’s “The Wind.”
J.T. Bushnell on how Michael Deagler’s “New Poets” makes us rethink an old trope: the antagonist.
“The horror of the residency is not that one can’t leave; it’s that one doesn’t have to”: Nora Kipnis on Carmen Maria Machado’s version of the cabin in the woods.
“The stories here show simultaneously how life is lived and what it feels like to be Black, rendered in ways that are honest and brutal.” Jessica Sullivan on “The Finkelstein 5” from Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s collection Friday Black.
Josie Tolin on how George Saunders uses a sense of familial inevitability “to both subvert and amplify what might otherwise be a run-of-the-mill, bad-dad situation” in his story “Sticks.”
“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?”
“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.”
