Articles tagged "short stories"

Books Review

Boston Noir by Dennis Lehane, Ed.

by Michael Patrick Brady

[16.Nov.09] :. This anthology is a lot like the city it aims to depict: occasionally impressive, at times insincere, and very proud of its quirks and foibles.

Recent Book reviews

Books Review

I Go To Some Hollow by Amina Cain

by Ryan Michael Williams

[30.Apr.09] :. At her best, Cain does a remarkable job of precisely evoking the way her characters feel as they give themselves over to the experience of some small, mundane mystery.

Recent Book reviews

Books Feature

Nam Le: To Write or Not to Write an Ethnic Story

by Michael Caylo-Baradi

[5.Mar.09] :. The stories are not about arrivals per se, but rather about approximate ideas of authorial arrival, about notions that an imagination, an author from a specific cultural background has arrived in the imagination of its diverse other(s).

Recent features

Books Review

Future Missionaries of America by Matthew Vollmer

by Rachel Smucker

[2.Feb.09] :. Like a throng of aging punk rockers at a Sex Pistols reunion concert, the characters all seem to possess the same type of aggressively apathetic outlook on life.

Recent Book reviews

Capsule Reviews

Populous with Short Stories: Drawn in Basic

by Ian Mathers

[7.Nov.08] :. Consistently lush, inviting and rewarding.

Capsule Reviews

Books Review

Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan

by Rachel Balik

[16.Oct.08] :. Treating the dismay and dissatisfaction of her characters as a quiet inconvenience, the real tragedy of these stories is their tone of grim and expedient inevitability.

Recent Book reviews

Wall of America by Thomas M. Disch

by Chris Barsanti

[1.Oct.08] :. An important and dutiful volume that catches readers up on just about everything Disch was doing, at least in science fiction, over the past few years.

A Happy Man and Other Stories

by Matthew Fiander

[22.Jul.08] :. Little details disturb the normality of these stories: chairs have three legs; a homeless man becomes guardian over an entire forest.

Oh Don’t You Cry for Me by Philip Shirley

by Abby Margulies

[26.Jun.08] :. In the sweltering heat of America's South, Philip Shirley conjures up a surprisingly insightful group of characters that are at once disturbed, complex, and woefully hopeful.

Confessions of a Falling Woman by Debra Dean

by Bill Reagan

[26.Jun.08] :. Dean clearly loves to craft sentences, and she does it very well -- her writing is painterly, little details accentuated to draw the reader into the story.

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2008 by Laura Furman (Editor)

by Chris Barsanti

[18.Jun.08] :. This book contains multitudes of professionally scripted short fiction, but very little that demands to be defined as "The Best".

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

by Matthew Fiander

[8.May.08] :. Lahiri often confuses size with scope, hoping that by making her stories long they will achieve some sort of literary heft.

Refresh, Refresh by Benjamin Percy

by Matthew Fiander

[26.Feb.08] :. Percy's stories are brave and fresh and -- because they reflect a nearly institutional violence all too easily identified as realistic -- scary.

Dead Boys by Richard Lange

by Matthew Fiander

[6.Nov.07] :. Lange's down-and-out L.A. stories are risky and vibrant, full of danger, grit, and bone-deep humanity.

Salmonella Men on Planet Porno by Yasutaka Tsutsui

by Megan Milks

[21.Aug.07] :. There's a mean streak of misogyny that runs almost throughout the collection and tends to distract from everything else going on around it.

New Stories from the South by Edward P. Jones (Guest Editor) and Kathy Pories (Series Editor)

by Matthew Fiander

[9.Aug.07] :. The best of these stories drive their characters to a point where, as Edward P. Jones puts it, their world has shifted, in small or large ways.

Interfictions by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss

by Mikita Brottman

[17.Jul.07] :. What struck me most about these "interfictions," however, was their striking similarity, rather than their difference.