Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘short stories’

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"Move over, Oprah," says book club for story collections

by Anne Stameshkin

Writer-blogger Andrew Scott has started Andrew’s Book Club, which recommends two story collections every month, one from a mainstream publisher and one from an independent press; Andrew encourages all book club members to buy at least one of these two books each month, investing in twelve collections each year. His January picks are Lauren Groff’s Delicate, Edible Birds and Allison Amend’s Things That Pass for Love. Andrew’s Book Club offers a blog, a Facebook site, and a mission: to boost sales of the collections Andrew endorses; to boost sales of story collections, period; and to encourage discussion of the books […]


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recommended reading: two short stories

by Anne Stameshkin

I teach in Connecticut on Wednesdays, so it’s the perfect excuse to shirk blogging duties and link to two of the best stories I’ve read this year: 1. “Nine” by Aryn Kyle, from the Atlantic‘s 2008 Fiction Issue. If it strikes your fancy, read Kyle’s debut novel, The God of Animals, now available in paperback and reviewed here on FWR. 2. “Face” by Alice Munro, from the September 8 New Yorker. What a fresh story! Who can “make it new” after more than a dozen collections? Alice Munro, that’s who.


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length matters

by Anne Stameshkin

In this week’s NY Times Book Review, Stephen Millhauser waxes succinctly on the short story — its virtues and titanic ambitions: The short story — how modest in bearing! How unassuming in manner! It sits there quietly, eyes lowered, almost as if trying not to be noticed. And if it should somehow attract your attention, it says quickly, in a brave little self-deprecating voice alive to all the possibilities of disappointment: “I’m not a novel, you know. Not even a short one. If that’s what you’re looking for, you don’t want me.” Read the rest (and see what cut of […]


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Tin House shout-out

by Anne Stameshkin

Pick up the current issue of Tin House and read “Fresco, Byzantine,” a story by FWR contributor Natalie Bakopoulos. They had come of age in such places, those island prisons—during the Nazi occupations, during the civil war, throughout the fifties, and now—and now some were growing old there. This issue, “Political Future,” also features fiction, nonfiction, or political-literary commentary from the likes of José Saramago, Thomas Franks, Francine Prose, Wallace Shawn, Cynthia Ozick, Dorothy Allison, Charles Baxter, John Barth, Junot Díaz, George Saunders, Lydia Davis, Lydia Millet, and others.




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