Stories We Love: “Home,” by George Saunders
by George McCormick
“I wondered if this was going to be too on the nose, if the students would feel provoked or become defensive.” George McCormick on teaching George Saunders’s “Home” in an Army town.
“I wondered if this was going to be too on the nose, if the students would feel provoked or become defensive.” George McCormick on teaching George Saunders’s “Home” in an Army town.
“What is the end of the world to us? Is it the end of a marriage? The end of our families as we know them? Is it the splintering of a relationship with a loved one? Or is it the literal Rapture?”
“I love ‘The Great Silence’ because it is the odd bird out, or, to double down and use another cliché, the canary in the literary coal mine of the collection that warns us that we might all be doomed if we don’t listen.”
“What I love is the defamiliarization.” Kent Kosack appreciates the aesthetic openness of Catherine Lacey’s short story “The Healing Center.”
“That moment when we realize our parents are people, regular people, with flaws and separate lives we have no access to. Brought home, made palpable for the reader, in that little clattering spoon”: Kent Kosack on Lucia Berlin’s coming-of-age story “Itinerary.”
“Soon matters take an even darker turn.” Jacob M. Appel on Shirley Jackson’s most unsettling short story.
“Sam Lipsyte drops us right into a room of lack and fear occupied by Tovah Gold”: Mo Daviau on Sam Lipsyte’s “The Climber Room.”
“And yet, it works. Not only does it work, it’s essential to the story. The form is the story.” Kent Kosack takes a look at Bernard Malamud’s puzzling POV-shifter, “My Son the Murderer.”
“How can I describe my feelings upon reaching this conclusion?”: Jamie Yourdon on Aurelie Sheehan’s “The Nursing Home,” from her new collection, Once into the Night, out from the University of Alabama Press.
“How the writer views the world, their unique angle of vision, is what can draw us in by inviting us to briefly leave behind our familiar vantage point.” Kent Kosack on the power of observation in Dorthe Nors’s “The Heron.”
