On her most recent collection, Almost Famous Women: “I was fascinated by the orbit of fame, the way it influences a power dynamic, or the way we are so quick to be reverent of greatness.”
“To be honest, I’d say that in the end the only thing that ultimately matters in story writing is simply trying to create a strong and original narrative, plus always aiming to make every story a little tour de force, which is a what a truly successful short story should be, possessing that intensity—it’s why a story is so much different than a novel and special in a way.”
“While the focus remains on R’s mother and her quest, we see how a plight that seems unique when the story opens—how many mothers set out to rescue their sons from foreign militants?—lies on a continuum of vulnerability for women living in nations at war.”
Join us for our seventh-annual celebration of the Short Story, as we dedicate the month of May to short fiction.
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.
On Lydia Davis’s “Letter” stories from her new collection, Can’t and Won’t
Happy Short Story Month 2014! Once again, we’ll be celebrating short stories all month here at Fiction Writers Review. This months we have interviews, reviews, and craft essays, as well as the return of our “Stories We Love” series: writers on the stories that inspire them—and why. So here’s to our sixth great May full of short fiction. We hope you’ll join us regularly throughout the next few weeks, and that you’ll help us spread the word. Thank you!
“Above all, it must be compelling,” James Salter told the Paris Review in 1993 when asked about his idea of the short story. “You’re sitting around the campfire of literature, so to speak, and various voices speak up out of the dark and begin talking. With some, your mind wanders or you doze off, but with others you are held by every word. The first line, the first sentence, the first paragraph, all have to compel you.” Long before I ever read those remarks by Salter, I’d already come under the influence of his short stories and, in particular, his […]
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 […]
