Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘Stories we love’

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Stories We Love: "The Lottery"

I don’t remember the first time I read “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. It seems I’ve been haunted by that story forever: the dusty June center of town where the annual lottery is held, in my imagination a composition of all the Vermont towns I’ve lived in, and the blind cruelty of the populace a reflection of blind cruelty everywhere. The idea of “The Lottery” is that people can turn on one another for no reason other than that it’s what everyone else is doing, that we follow the crowd even when the request or demand that’s being made is […]


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Stories We Love: Impossible Things

A short story collection I re-read at least once a year is Connie Willis’s Impossible Things. It begins with the obligatory Lewis Carroll epigraph, but then adds another from Auden: “Nothing can save us that is possible.” One of Connie Willis’s overarching themes is communication: what do we say to each other and, of those conversations, what do we actually understand? One story follows a NASA negotiator and a woman renting him a few square feet in a Japanese apartment as they try to figure out if the friendly aliens who’ve just arrived at Earth are trying to set up […]


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Stories We Love: "A View of the Woods"

While Flannery O’Connor combined humor and sadism in ways as mysterious as they are effective, to me, the way she was able to render horrific actions in people and still somehow make me sympathetic is her greatest achievement—even more so when she breaks out of the highly symbolic framings of tales such as “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People.” While these are incredible stories, less-known ones, in which characters transcend her desire to make them mere chess pieces and instead achieve a full humanity, are where she truly scorches. “A View of the Woods” is […]


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Stories We Love: "Dog Song"

by Lee Thomas

I’ve been wary of dog yarns ever since my mother sobbed through the final chapters of Where the Red Fern Grows, and I didn’t discover until years later the real fate of Old Dan. It was affecting – perhaps too much so – but I also felt cheated somehow, that an emotion so universally felt was a writer’s cheap shot. Some stories come like a revelation. Ann Pancake’s “Dog Song”—twenty-one pages of alchemical genius, pure voice, and indescribable originality—changed my mind about the dogs, and made me an evangelist. Evan Rehill has been championing this story, and gave it to […]




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