Stories We Love: "A Small, Good Thing" by Raymond Carver
by Douglas Trevor
“‘A Small, Good Thing’ is much bigger than it should be”: Douglas Trevor examines the expansiveness of short fiction in this Shop Talk essay.
“‘A Small, Good Thing’ is much bigger than it should be”: Douglas Trevor examines the expansiveness of short fiction in this Shop Talk essay.
“Raised on Southern manners, I thrill at the way Gilchrist foxtrots through tea-sipping customs while exposing all manner of prejudice through her narrator, ten-year-old Rhoda, who absorbs the language of the adults around her and then spits it back at them indiscriminately”: Rebecca Scherm explores the power of child narrators through Ellen Gilchrist’s story “Revenge.”
“Somewhere by the second page, I realized my early questions hardly mattered. Something marvelous and magical had begun to unspool across the page and hang-ups about structure or how much autobiography a reader could assume were wholly irrelevant”: Lee Thomas on the rules Steven Millhauser’s “A Voice in the Night” defies.
“Slow and rich and so atmospheric that you can taste the ocean’s salt spray on your lips, ‘The Boat’ is run through with that rarest of qualities in fiction: the story feels mythic”: Joshua Bodwell on Alistair MacLeod’s short fiction.
“Anthony Doerr is given to what we might call the extended-play short story: instead of hours or days, years go by”: Leah Falk considers the expansiveness of Anthony Doerr’s short story “The Caretaker.”
“Dick” is a snorter, a mean cackler, a muffled hooter. It’s a story to read on the subway home from a maddening staff meeting, or on your front steps after a surreal and unpleasant interaction with a neighbor, or to prepare for a holiday with extended family. Ann Ponders (har har) moves her husband and son from L.A. to Colorado, hoping to leave everything unnerving behind: her snorting, smoking daughter Lizzie, “clever and duplicitous” in “the whole smooth suit of skin she wore without thinking”; her Alzheimer’s-addled mother, now in a nursing home; her young son’s best friend, Dick, who […]
During a past Short Story Month, I suggested five ways we might celebrate short stories. Topping the list was this recommendation: Participate in #StorySunday: Reminded each Sunday by @TaniaHershman, short-story fans are encouraged to share a link via Twitter to someone else’s short story using the hashtag #StorySunday. Quick. Painless. Free. Click here to see the latest #StorySunday tweets. Three years after the London-born Hershman launched it, #StorySunday is still going strong. To celebrate Short Story Month 2013, I decided to check in with her to learn more about the hashtag. She graciously took time from her busy schedule (which […]
“Worst of all, this is a story where we already know the ending”: Celeste Ng counts the sins and ultimate successes of Angela Carter’s story “The Fall River Axe Murders.”
Once upon a time in Seattle I lived with a lawyer, a librarian, an engineer, and a retailer. We threw dance-y parties and hosted champagne and apricot scone brunches. We read by the fireplace and played after dinner games of Settlers of Catan. And although we did not know one another prior to moving in together—we met the old-fashion way, on craigslist—we became close. It started with the lawyer, and after a time the whole house was online dating. They, like many twenty-odds, were using OkCupid—“the Google of online dating.” Soon, our wholesome after dinner board games changed to after […]
Happy Short Story Month 2013! Once again, we’ll be celebrating short stories all month here at Fiction Writers Review: Reviews of fantastic story collections, such as Jamie Quatro’s debut I Want to Show You More, which is our lead feature for the month. We’re also excited to publish reviews of Ethan Rutherford‘s The Peripatetic Coffin, Karen Russell‘s Vampires in the Lemon Grove, and several others that we’ve been saving for Short Story Month. Interviews with established writers like Charles Yu, debut authors like Sarah Gerkensmeyer, whose collection What You Are Now Enjoying is currently longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International […]
