It was a case of social media serendipity: when I posted my rave review of Shann Ray’s short story collection, American Masculine, Alan Heathcock tweeted the link in support of the book. I realized Heathcock’s own collection of short stories, Volt, had been enticingly reviewed by Trevor at The Mookse and the Gripes. So, [...]
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Shann Ray’s debut short story collection American Masculine, recently published by Graywolf Press and winner of the Katherine Bakeless Nason Literary Publication Prize, has a number of similarities to The Lives of Rocks, at least on the surface. The stories in both books take place in the American West and have a decidedly American [...] The title story of Rick Bass’s 2006 six short story collection The Lives of Rocks is long, almost a novella, and tells the story of Jyl, a woman stricken with cancer. Someplace in Montana or Wyoming or similar, a single woman in a lone valley cabin must pump her own water and keep up [...] In his review of The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, Matt Rowan wrote: This latter tale is the kind of story I wish I’d written (but didn’t / can’t), because it so perfectly encapsulates all those ideas of contemporary pluralism and social equity of modern liberalism, and the realistic challenges of actually understanding someone [...] Matt Rowan of Bob Einstein’s Literary Equations broke my rules when he challenged me to read some contemporary literature, but with a local hook I decided to go with it. Good move: Chicago writer Patrick Somerville’s collection of short stories, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, couldn’t have impressed me more. The writing is [...] I had suspected a while back that Maile Meloy’s short story collection Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It was exactly the kind of “program fiction” I would like, and after Trevor at The Mookse and the Gripes gushed about it over the summer I said, “Boom! It will be mine!” It [...] The Tale, a collection of four short stories by Joseph Conrad published by Hesperus Press, includes “The Warrior’s Soul,” “Prince Roman,” “The Tale,” and “The Black Mate,” published originally in several magazines between 1908 and 1917. In his foreword to this volume, Philip Hensher writes on how “[m]ost authors have a fictional length which [...] Though I started on Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows, five full books turned out to be too much for NYRB Reading Week. So instead, something a bit different. Thanks to The Literary Stew and Coffeespoons for hosting NYRB Reading Week. It’s been fantastic! Since the defining quality of Randall Jarrell’s Book of Stories, edited [...] Just after I finished writing my less-than-positive post on world-building in Jean-Christophe Valtat’s Aurorarama I encountered an example of fantasy that put it to shame in a fraction of the length. It’s probably not fair to compare most writers, especially most contemporary writers (who haven’t been preselected for us by their staying power) [...] I hadn’t been looking forward to re-reading The Piazza Tales as much as I had Moby-Dick, because the time since my last read was much shorter. That was silly, though, because this has some of my favorite of Melville’s writing (isn’t it almost all my favorite at this point?), and the good was even [...] |
My Personal Canon (ongoing project) |
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