“Maybe how we choose to tell the stories of our pain can allow us to turn that pain into something greater, something necessary, something that might ease the pain of others.” Karin Killian on narrative technique in Lauren Groff’s “The Wind.”
Kent Kosack on retrospective narration in J.D. Salinger’s “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period.”
J.T. Bushnell on how Michael Deagler’s “New Poets” makes us rethink an old trope: the antagonist.
“His narrator’s point of view evolves with the story, revealing this evolution through how he sees his setting”: Kent Kosack on Tobias Wolff’s subtle gem “Powder.”
“The horror of the residency is not that one can’t leave; it’s that one doesn’t have to”: Nora Kipnis on Carmen Maria Machado’s version of the cabin in the woods.
“The stories here show simultaneously how life is lived and what it feels like to be Black, rendered in ways that are honest and brutal.” Jessica Sullivan on “The Finkelstein 5” from Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s collection Friday Black.
“Homes delivers exactly on her narrator’s opening promise”: Barrett Bowlin on A.M. Homes’s cult classic short story “A Real Doll.”
“The truth of the story somehow comforts”: Kent Kosack on Lauren Groff’s “Ghosts and Empties.”
Josie Tolin on how George Saunders uses a sense of familial inevitability “to both subvert and amplify what might otherwise be a run-of-the-mill, bad-dad situation” in his story “Sticks.”
“It isn’t solace Emily and Eva are seeking, but a way to transform their pain.” Amber Wheeler Bacon on Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” and “Tell Me a Riddle.”
