Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘short stories’

Reviews |

Forgetting English, by Midge Raymond

by Erika Dreifus

In her impressive debut collection, Forgetting English, Midge Raymond sets her stories in a variety of locations outside the continental United States. How many other collections can you think of that contain eight stories spanning four continents: Africa, Asia, Antarctica, and North America (mainly Hawaii)? Alongside personal, human histories, Raymond incorporates larger traditions. Marriage rites. Fertility symbols. The meaning of jade. The natural history of the penguin.


Reviews |

Pretty Monsters, by Kelly Link

by Charlotte Boulay

I want my life to be a Kelly Link story. I mean it, even though many of the characters in her stories are a little lost, literally or emotionally, and even though others are in danger. Pretty Monsters is intended to be a young adult collection of short stories. This in itself is new—there aren’t many YA story collections, are there? But even if there are, there is nothing like Kelly Link. It’s useful that a few of the stories in Pretty Monsters are republished from her earlier collections, Magic for Beginners and Stranger Things Happen, because I can’t talk about Kelly Link without talking about the story “Stone Animals,” which first appeared in the Best American Short Stories in 2005, and then in Magic. I still dream about it sometimes. There was a period of almost a year after I first read it when, no matter what else I was reading, I wished it was “Stone Animals.” I’ve read it a dozen times. I sort of want to be reading it right now.


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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Short Story Month rec: "Carry the Water, Hustle the Hole" by Allison Amend

I have a hard time remembering that I actually like short stories, even though Elizabeth Crane and Melissa Bank and Lorrie Moore are some of my favorite living authors, and short fiction is some (or all) of their best work. So when our wise and talented editor raved about Allison Amend’s newest collection, it took me half a year to get around to reading it. Don’t wait as long as I did. Things that Pass for Love is beautiful and brilliant, each story distinctly separate and distinctly wonderful. It’s hard to choose a favorite, but let’s go with “Carry the […]


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May picks from Andrew's Book Club

by Anne Stameshkin

For Short Story Month itself, Andrew recommends the following collections: Indie Press: The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards by Robert Boswell (Graywolf) University Press: American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell (Wayne State UP, from the Made in Michigan Writers Series) Andrew’s Book Club also currently features an interview with author Tracy Winn, whose debut collection of linked stories, Mrs. Somebody Somebody, published in April (Southern Methodist UP). Read the first line from each story in Robert Boswell’s new collection here. See Bonnie Jo Campbell read from American Salvage at the following events/venues: – May 14 – Made in Michigan Writers […]


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Short Story Month rec: "Bullet in the Brain"

by Celeste Ng

Recently, I was at Grub Street’s Muse and the Marketplace writers’ conference here in Boston, and in one session we looked at Tobias Wolff‘s “Bullet in the Brain.” I was surprised at (1) how many people had not read the story–of a group of 30 people, I was one of maybe 5 who had, and (2) how amazing this story really is. So compressed and so focused: crystalline. Perfect for teaching yourself, or others: you can take it apart, sentence by sentence, and figure out why each word is there and exactly how the story is working. And yet, even […]


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May is Short Story Month on EWN – so let's talk stories

by Anne Stameshkin

Emerging Writers Network’s Dan Wickett is devoting May to reading and discussing short stories; his goal is three a day for a month — so just under 100 stories. Be sure to check it out. And let’s try a sister-experiment here: FWR contributors and readers, I invite/challenge (whichever word you find more motivating) each of you to read or re-read some short stories in May and write to me about one of them that really rocks your writerly world. I’m not talking full-scale reviews (though if what you write becomes something longer, that’s OK)…just a paragraph or even a couple […]


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In Praise of Brevity, Part II: how the Kindle might help popularize the short story

by Anne Stameshkin

A. O. Scott, from this weekend’s NY Times: “And just as the iPod has killed the album, so the Kindle might, in time, spur a revival of the short story. If you can buy a single song for a dollar, why wouldn’t you spend that much on a handy, compact package of character, incident and linguistic invention? Why wouldn’t you collect dozens, or hundreds, into a personal anthology, a playlist of humor, pathos, mystery and surprise?”


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short story bubble?

by Anne Stameshkin

On the Virginia Quarterly Review blog, Michael Lukas worries that AWP’s heightened emphasis on the short story is a contributing factor to what he calls the “Short Story Bubble”–and its eventual burst. I’m not sure I entirely buy his argument, but hey, it’s worth discussing… All around the country, thousands of young fiction writers are scribbling furiously, focusing their creative and psychological energies on producing and publishing short stories, not necessarily because the short story is their favorite form. But, rather, because it’s the form best suited to the workshop, because they think it’s the easiest way to get published, […]


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Harper Perennial celebrates the short story

by Anne Stameshkin

Harper Perennial is already building buzz for its upcoming Summer of the Short Story campaign, declaring that “it’s high time to celebrate the much-loved, but oft-overlooked, short story form.” The publisher will promote six new collections (due to publish this summer and fall)—along with six collections of classic shorts. The festivities will begin in earnest this May, but in the meantime, Perennial is featuring a new story every week in 2009 on a site called Fifty-Two Stories. According to Cal Morgan: Some of them will be new stories from our original collections, or from upcoming hardcovers; some original contributions never […]




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