Stories We Love: “The Bobcat,” by Rebecca Lee
by Christina Ward-Niven
“And a bobcat may somehow be involved. How can we not read on?”: Christina Ward-Niven takes a close look at the control of tension in Rebecca Lee’s “Bobcat.”
“And a bobcat may somehow be involved. How can we not read on?”: Christina Ward-Niven takes a close look at the control of tension in Rebecca Lee’s “Bobcat.”
“I love this story because it’s haunting, and hauntingly well-wrought”: Ellen Prentiss Campbell celebrates Josephine Jacobsen and her story “The Edge of the Sea.”
“Each one of these stories—each of these characters—leans heavily on another”: Christi Craig reviews Yang Huang’s new collection of linked stories, My Old Faithful, winner of the University of Massachusetts’s Juniper Prize for Fiction.
“But there is a catch, a move du Maurier makes that transforms the story from a claustrophobic exploration of gender confinement and powerlessness to something stranger and more sinister”: In this Stories We Love essay, Michael Shou-Yung Shum takes on Daphne du Maurier’s “Blue Lenses.”
“Like the multitudinous star fields that encompass the known universe, Heathcock’s universe is made not only of dark material, but light”: Shann Ray on the human form under pressure in Alan Heathcock’s “The Staying Freight.”
“She captures so beautifully the isolation that many feel in an increasingly cloistered Midwest, the desperation we all experience in our teeter-totter of needs and wants”: Mike Ferro appreciates Laura Hulthen Thomas’s “Sole Suspect” in this Stories We Love essay.
“Driscoll was a poet before turning to fiction. Poetic language is dreamlike, and therefore suited to close narration. And Driscoll’s elegant language anchors the reader in the haunting dream.”
“This is the last gift of King’s story—her decision to allow happiness to have the last word, to make the ephemeral feeling permanent, if only in fiction”: Lillian Li on Lily King’s One Story story.
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.
“His fiction is baffling and fresh enough to revert even experienced readers back into novices”: Eric McDowell on metafiction and writing lessons in César Aira’s “The All That Ploughs through the Nothing.” Aira’s latest in translation, The Little Buddhist Monk & The Proof, comes out today from New Directions.
