Stories We Love: “Scissors,” by Charles Baxter
“But quickly enough this tale reminded me of what I love about Baxter”: Jim Nichols on Charles Baxter’s story “Scissors.”
“But quickly enough this tale reminded me of what I love about Baxter”: Jim Nichols on Charles Baxter’s story “Scissors.”
“It is a story, like love, as fanciful and appealing as a unicorn crossed with a whale, and as real and baffling as a narwhal.”
“While the focus remains on R’s mother and her quest, we see how a plight that seems unique when the story opens—how many mothers set out to rescue their sons from foreign militants?—lies on a continuum of vulnerability for women living in nations at war.”
Burning through Adam Haslett’s “Notes to my Biographer”
“[Henderson] invites us to this place like she might a sleepover between friends, sharing the stories of adolescent wonders and tragedies the way young girls share gossip.”
Writing in appreciation of Nicholas Delbanco’s short story “Departure,” Nina Buckless says, “We are offered a portrait in fragments, which collectively captures a family separated by the American landscape but held together by its matriarch.”
“William Gass’s ‘In the Heart of the Heart of the Country’ stands as an answer for what it means to write from the Midwest. Told in thirty-six discrete sections, this story is a devastatingly gorgeous meditation on loss and the rhythms of the Midwestern landscape.
“As the title suggests, ’55 Miles to the Gas Pump,’ while somewhat interested in the abuse and murder of women and the troubled marriage of Rancher Croom and Mrs. Croom, isn’t exactly about those things.”
On Barthelme, that comforting surrealist.
Perhaps no story, though, plays back through my head more often than Richard Ford’s “Rock Springs.”
