Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘Wells Tower’

Shop Talk |

Thoughts on shorts: Wells Tower

“I think the best stories start from something tiny. […] A short story can easily destroy itself through metastasis. I think if you start a story with more than two scenes in mind, you may be doomed. At least you have a hell of a lot of work ahead of you. If I start off trying to get at this one little moment, that’s all I want to do. And then I have to build the world that makes that moment happen.” ~ Wells Tower Further Reading: Read more about Wells Tower on Fiction Writers Review Looking for something to […]


Reviews |

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower

The first things you feel are joy and awe. The stories in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells Tower’s first collection, are pieces that care, first and last, about telling a damn good story. Tower’s use of compression and summary to contextualize poignant or dramatic scenes is elegant and efficient. The granular and hilarious detailing of landscapes—North Carolina’s landscapes, in particular, are exuberantly and beautifully rendered in this collection—and of characters is solid, remarkable. The virtuosic moments in Tower’s prose make us gape, wince, laugh out loud: the hilarious or heart-rending one-liners, the hard-eyed endings, the way in which objects are imbued with astonishing, imagined inner lives of their own. But these stories are also relentlessly cynical.



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