Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘debut story collection’

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Andrew's Book Club: June 2009 recs

by Anne Stameshkin

Andrew’s Book Club recommends Josh Weil‘s debut collection, The New Valley (Grove), as June’s Big House pick and Midge Raymond‘s Forgetting English (Eastern Washington UP), winner of the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction, as its University Press pick. Also new on the ABC site is Andrew’s interview with Bonnie Jo Campbell, whose story collection American Salvage was a pick last month. **This week, FWR will publish Erika Dreifus‘ review of Forgetting English, so check back to read more about it.**


Reviews |

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower

by Brian Short

The first things you feel are joy and awe. The stories in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells Tower’s first collection, are pieces that care, first and last, about telling a damn good story. Tower’s use of compression and summary to contextualize poignant or dramatic scenes is elegant and efficient. The granular and hilarious detailing of landscapes—North Carolina’s landscapes, in particular, are exuberantly and beautifully rendered in this collection—and of characters is solid, remarkable. The virtuosic moments in Tower’s prose make us gape, wince, laugh out loud: the hilarious or heart-rending one-liners, the hard-eyed endings, the way in which objects are imbued with astonishing, imagined inner lives of their own. But these stories are also relentlessly cynical.


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Andrew's Book Club: April Picks

by Anne Stameshkin

Here they are, the April collections Andrew urges us to buy, read, and recommend. This month, all three books are debuts. Viva la short story–and the emerging writer! University Press Pick: Tracy Winn’s Mrs. Somebody Somebody (Southern Methodist UP) Indie Pick: Paul Yoon’s Once the Shore (Sarabande) Big House Pick: Kevin Wilson’s Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Harper Perennial)


Reviews |

In the Convent of Little Flowers, by Indu Sundaresan

by Lee Thomas

Indu Sundaresan’s fourth book and first story collection, In the Convent of Little Flowers, contains India’s multitudes, all in relationships of opposition – men vs. women, traditional vs. new, haves vs. have-nots. Throughout these nine stories, Sundaresan cultivates empathy for her characters and their individual anguish at straddling those great divides.


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recommended reading: Allison Amend at T&W Collective (NYC) on 1/21

by Anne Stameshkin

I go to a lot of readings. It’s a rare week when I don’t attend at least one or two. And while I’d say I enjoy them in the abstract, I have to admit that too often, even when I love the writer, I wind up kind of bored or restless: I think about my own writing, or I agonize over that leaning tower of laundry back home, an unfinished freelance project, the friend whose novel draft I *still* haven’t finished reading, whether my water bottle is slowly emptying into my sad, overstuffed purse… Not so with the One-Story reading […]




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