Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘short stories’

Reviews |

We Are the Friction: Illustration vs. Short Fiction (edited by Sing Statistics)

by Lee Thomas

Even the idea itself is intriguing: pair twelve international illustrators and short fiction writers, press go, see what happens. The slim, wonderfully designed collection We Are the Friction sets the stage for unexpected relationships. Following their 2008 collaboration, I Am the Friction, the masterminds behind the concept are designer Jez Burrows and illustrator Lizzy Stewart, who together form Sing Statistics. Both Burrows and Stewart are based in Edinburgh, but the two-dozen writers and illustrators in this anthology reside across the globe – from Toronto to Kansas City to Barcelona. The cover promises a veritable garden of earthly delights: “5 Giant Animals, 63 Expletives, 6 Instances of the Ocean,” and “1 Sentient Muffin” among them. Let’s begin with that muffin.


Interviews |

Listening to the Tiny Voice: An Interview with Kathryn Ma

Neela Banerjee talks with Kathryn Ma, the first Asian American to win the Iowa Prize in that contest’s 40-year history. Ma channels rage and its antidote, humor, in her debut collection, All That Work and Still No Boys, which features unapologetically Asian American characters who don’t do any cooking or talking to ghosts.


Reviews |

Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia, edited by Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker

Life in Russia, said author Aleksander Snegirev, at Housing Works’ September 21 Rasskazy event, is uncomfortable, but always interesting. So, too, are the stories in this plump new anthology from Tin House: Arkady Babchenko’s beleaguered soldier returns to Chechnya a page away from German Sadulaev’s lyrical descriptions of Chechnya’s devastated countryside. The binding is a veritable trench across which both narrators peek at each other warily.


Shop Talk |

Best American Short Stories by the numbers

by Celeste Ng

The Millions pointed us to this interesting analysis of the Best American Short Stories series from the blog Years of BASS. Jake, the brain behind Years of BASS, has read all of the collections since the 1978 edition and compiled some statistics. C. Max Magee (of The Millions) reports: Interestingly, Alice Munro, though Canadian, has made the most BASS appearances over the last 30 years by a wide margin with 18 appearances. After her come some more of the leading lights of short fiction: Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike with nine stories each; Mavis Gallant (another Canadian) with eight; […]


Shop Talk |

Tobias Wolff, on the future of the short story

by Celeste Ng

The Morning News has a great interview with Tobias Wolff by Robert Birnbaum. As contemporary writers go, Wolff has a somewhat unusual publication record: he’s published one novel, one novella, and five collections of stories. But dip into any of them and you’ll see why. Wolff can rightly be called a master of the short form, and in the interview, he shares some thoughts on both it and its future: RB: You would think somehow that—this being a hyper-accelerated era where time is so precious to people—that short stories would be more popular; they would be more digestible. People would […]


Interviews |

Miles from Nowhere: A Conversation with Nami Mun

by Greg Schutz

“Fiction is my default writing mode. Whenever I witness something odd on the streets or hear intriguing dialogue on the trains, my first impulse is to drop these things into my fiction bank. I don’t have a memoir bank. Fiction, to me, is running through the woods rather than running on a treadmill. It’s freedom to make up characters, setting, situations, etc.—and through this freedom I feel better equipped to express and explore my ideas.”


Shop Talk |

Andrew's Book Club: November Picks

by Anne Stameshkin

As a huge fan of Munro and Dzanc, I’m especially excited about Andrew’s picks for this month. (This is what the world will look like when there is too much happiness!) – Indie Pick: Laura van den Berg’s debut, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc) / description (via ABC): A failed actress takes a job as a Bigfoot impersonator. A botanist seeking a rare flower crosses paths with a group of men hunting the Loch Ness Monster. A disillusioned missionary in Africa grapples with grief and a growing obsession with a creature rumored […]


Reviews |

God's Dogs, by Mitch Wieland

by Tyler McMahon

In an age of books built from blogs, tweets, and text messages, God’s Dogs, Mitch Wieland’s new novel-in-stories, feels as though it were made of wood. It is regional, elemental, and bears the marks of its maker: the careful grooves of his chisel, the smooth surfaces from the author’s finest sandpaper, even rough-hewn gouges by what might have been teeth or fingernails.


Shop Talk |

McSweeney's 33: Litmag Meets News

by Celeste Ng

McSweeney’s next issue will be packaged in the form of an old-fashioned newspaper. The New York Times‘s ArtsBeat reports: McSweeney’s No. 33 is to be in the form of a daily broadsheet — a big, old-fashioned broadsheet. The pages will measure 22 by 15 inches. (Pages of The New York Times, by comparison, are 22 by 11 1/2 inches.) Called San Francisco Panorama, the editors say it is, in large part, homage to an institution that they feel, contrary to conventional wisdom, still has a lot of life in it. Their experience in publishing literary fiction is something of a […]


Shop Talk |

Simon Van Booy wins world’s largest short story prize

by Joshua Bodwell

On September 20th, at a ceremony in Cork, Ireland, the 34-year-old author Simon Van Booy collected the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and a 35, 000 Euro check for his collection, Love Beings in Winter (Harper Perennial, 2009). When last year’s O’Connor Award was given to Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, judges did away with even selecting a shortlist. This year, however, Van Booy one of six writers that made up an impressive, international shortlist: An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah (Zimbabwe); Singularity by Charlotte Grimshaw (New Zealand); Ripples and other Stories by Shih-Li Kow (Malaysia); The Pleasant Light […]




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