Daniel Orozco’s debut has been a long time coming. Now fans of his prizewinning fiction can enjoy an entire collection, Orientation: And Other Stories. Michael Shilling calls him in Idaho to talk geographic love letters, G. Gordon Liddy, and the peculiar challenge of gimmicks.
This week’s feature is Miracle Boy and Other Stories, by Pinckney Benedict. Published this year by Press 53, the collection features a misfit cast of characters from the mountains of West Virginia. Known by names like “Lizard” and “mudman,” their very out-thereness commands the respect of reader. These backwoods folk may be wildly different from your friends and neighbors, but Benedict makes them impossible to ignore or dismiss, so vividly drawn they refuse easy definitions. Benedict is the author of two previous story collections, Town Smokes and The Wrecking Yard, and a novel, Dogs of God. Miracle Boy has been […]
Shawn Mitchell gets under the hood of Pinckney Benedict’s Miracle Boy and Other Stories to see how the author manages to pack an apocalypse into each story. In his newest book, Benedict revisits his Appalachian heritage and peoples it with mythological bulls, dogs, mudmen, and robots.
In her pithy introduction to the recent Granta Book of the Irish Short Story, Anne Enright waltzes around the question that all anthology editors seem obligated to address: what makes a short story a short story? And, in the case of this anthology, what makes the Irish short story exceptional? Enright considers, rejects, and modifies many possibilities. She draws on that old master of the form, Frank O’Connor: the story is dictated by its needs alone; the story is always about human loneliness; the story thrives among “submerged population groups.” She quotes Sean Ó Faoláin’s demand that a story be […]
Two recent releases from Dzanc imprint Keyhole Press expand the scope of literary fiction. How to Predict the Weather by Aaron Burch and How They Were Found by Matt Bell create provocative new worlds in their debut collections of short stories. Consistent with this press’s production of thought-provoking fiction, Burch and Bell unravel beautiful and unsettling tales with exquisite prose.
This week’s featured title is Edith Pearlman’s story collection Binocular Vision. The consummate short story writer, Edith Pearlman has published more than 250 works of short fiction and non-fiction over the past four decades. Her fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, New Stories from the South, the Antioch Review, Ascent, the New England Review, and The Pushcart Prize Best of the Small Presses. Pearlman has written travel essays about Budapest, Tokyo and the Costwalds for the New York Times, and reflections on the allure of the roulette table, and her husband’s “mistress” – […]
In Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories, Edith Pearlman grabs the reader’s attention and never lets it go. In this review, Andrea Nolan looks at some of Pearlman’s first lines and examines how her stories are united through character, theme, and place.
Tyler McMahon loves short stories but worries that collections might be the worst thing to have happened to the genre. However, books like Alan Heathcock’s Volt renew his faith in the collection as an art form of its own, one that makes its stories inseparable from one another—greater even than the sum of their parts.
On Wednesday, Anthony Doerr was awarded the 2010 Story Prize for his collection Memory Wall. The ceremony also honored two finalists, Yiyun Li and Suzanne Rivecca. Reports the Story Prize’s blog: Anthony Doerr, for instance, in answer to a question about the preponderance of older women in Memory Wall, talked about how his grandmother, who had Alzheimer’s disease, came to live with his family when he was in high school and how, in his teenage self-absorption, he had been somewhat oblivious to her condition. Yiyun Li discussed how her characters stubbornly resist being swept along by the tide of history—even […]
How often does it happen? Once or twice, maybe? You’re in a bookstore, you’re at the library, drifting among the stacks, your eye glazed over not with boredom but indecision, because you simply cannot decide what it is you want to read next. Reading something next, that’s the easy part, particularly if you’re one of those readers for whom the prospect of not reading something, anything, is just, well, unthinkable. You read one book or one story, and when you’ve finished that, you read another. It’s like breathing in a way, one breath and then another, and another. But on […]
