Every time I read this story I get a thrill, the sensation of having to hold on tight for a wild, plummeting ride, a dizzying shift in perspective, a cascade of questions that I can’t answer.
Confrontation becomes a powerful vessel in this narrator’s journey, and subsequently, the reader as passenger.
I love Megan Mayhew Bergman’s story “The Right Company” from her collection Birds of a Lesser Paradise.
Once upon a time in 1978, a dear friend gave me Colwin’s second novel, the Manhattan fairy tale Happy All the Time, to ease my then-broken heart.
On Lydia Davis’s “Letter” stories from her new collection, Can’t and Won’t
“The Point” does everything stories are supposed to, and many things they aren’t. It begins with a dream, for example, and ends with backstory, both big violations of craft and yet somehow perfect.
I’m not the kind of bibliophile who owns multiple copies of the same book—first editions, paperbacks, reprints, limited editions, and so on. I’ve never really had the living space to accommodate such a habit, but more over my books are littered with margin notes, end notes, notes for stories I’m working on, notes for stories I want to work on, so many red and blue-inked annotations that purchasing a new copy of Salinger’s Nine Stories or Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago would feel like cheating on the marked-up copies, betraying some long-term, intimate relationship. So there was no reason to […]
Any story I consider a favorite stirs up in me feelings of envy and wonder. “A Father’s Story,” by Andre Dubus, has this effect. On the first count, it’s the I-sure-wish-I’d-written-that moment. If you write and if you read, you know this feeling. Think early motivations. Maybe that feeling—we could dress it up and call it admiration, but that seems too mild—led you to write in the first place. Envy being the mother of imitation, maybe, hypothetically, it led you to write a story about a vampire gerbil that sucked fruit white. Gerbacula. Maybe you are very, very sorry about […]
“Raised on Southern manners, I thrill at the way Gilchrist foxtrots through tea-sipping customs while exposing all manner of prejudice through her narrator, ten-year-old Rhoda, who absorbs the language of the adults around her and then spits it back at them indiscriminately”: Rebecca Scherm explores the power of child narrators through Ellen Gilchrist’s story “Revenge.”
“Somewhere by the second page, I realized my early questions hardly mattered. Something marvelous and magical had begun to unspool across the page and hang-ups about structure or how much autobiography a reader could assume were wholly irrelevant”: Lee Thomas on the rules Steven Millhauser’s “A Voice in the Night” defies.
