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Posts Tagged ‘story collection’

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Andrew's Book Club: March picks

by Anne Stameshkin

For March, Andrew recommends three collections: 1. from a university press (University Press of Kentucky): Jim Tomlinson’s Nothing Like an Ocean: Eleven stories about life in the rural Kentucky town of Spivey; Tomlinson’s first collection, Things Kept, Things Left Behind, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award. 2. from an independent press (Autumn House): Samuel Ligon’s Drift and Swerve: From the author of the novel Safe in Heaven Dead, this story collection won the 2008 Autumn House Fiction Prize. 3. from a big house (Pantheon): Mary Gaitskill’s Don’t Cry. Gaitskill’s first collection in more than a decade is highly anticipated. Here’s […]


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Legend of a Suicide, by David Vann

The stories in David Vann’s second book, Legend of a Suicide, circle compulsively around a central fascination—a father’s suicide. Partway through “Sukkwan Island,” the central novella in the collection, I decided I had to put the book down—just for a day, until I felt ready to read on. I mean this as praise. Legend of a Suicide is a very difficult book for the very best reasons: it is written with great honesty and journeys unflinchingly into darkness. It is a reckoning.


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Cheating at Canasta, by William Trevor

William Trevor is a God anyone can believe in–ever-loving and omniscient, but not omnipotent. Even as he reveals lives destroyed or halted, one is calmed by his authority, safe in his hands. It’s true; there is nothing he can do to save his characters from themselves. But in his latest collection, Trevor does not just bear silent witness: unlike most contemporary short-story writers, he spells out his stories’ moral lessons, traces them to their furthest conclusions, and even ties up loose ends.


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Knockemstiff, by Donald Ray Pollock

by Phil Sandick

Donald Ray Pollock’s debut collection Knockemstiff begins with an epigraph from satirist Dawn Powell: “All Americans come from Ohio originally, if only briefly.” And yet, when it comes to Knockemstiff, Ohio—Pollock’s hometown and the purgatorial setting for these eighteen gritty stories—the fictional inhabitants rarely leave.


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Reviewlet: The View from the Seventh Layer by Kevin Brockmeier

by Anne Stameshkin

Once there was a city where everyone had the gift of song. Once there was a city where people did not look one another in the eye. Once there was a man who happened to buy God’s overcoat. The View from the Seventh Layer is a rich, ethereal collection: here are fables, ghost stories, romances (among them a sci-fi adaptation of “The Lady with the Pet Dog”), personal histories, anxieties of influence, and spiritual bursts — even a choose-your-own-adventure for the soul. These stories unfold in worlds just shy of our own, where metaphors take literal form. Each explores the […]


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Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work, by Jason Brown

Set in and around the fictional town of Vaughn, Brown’s stories contain characters driven by duty and guilt down paths furrowed by their own lapses and eccentricities. A cloud of fatalism hangs over many; the weight of the past—personal, familial, historical—presses constantly at their backs.




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