Werewolves in Their Youth: Stories, by Michael Chabon Michael Chabon’s, Werewolves in Their Youth isn’t a horror or sci-fi, though Chabon is a fan. The collection, published in 1999, features characters who move about in the placid light of day, until some triggering event causes a dark side to emerge. The results are the entertaining turns [….]
The Love of A Good Woman, Stories by Alice Munro The short story has few practitioners as skilled as Alice Munro, now 88, a writer who’s all but required reading during #ShortStoryMonth. Munro famously began writing stories as a young mother, finding the story took “less time.” Lucky for readers that the genre turned out [….]
Arranged Marriage: Stories, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Acclaimed poet, novelist, and story writer Chitra Banerjee Divrakaruni’s first book of fiction was published in 1995. The eleven stories in Arranged Marriage reveal her gift for chronicling female cultural dislocation and the compound identities that come with leaving one place, and its engrained customs and beliefs, for [….]
The Refugees: Stories, by Viet Thanh Nguyen May is Short Story Month, a great time to celebrate the short story, and the perfect opportunity to share some favorite Litstack recs of story collections, contemporary and classic. If you’re a fan of The Sympathizer, Viet Nguyen’s debut novel that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016, you’ll [….]
The Dead Fish Museum: Stories, by Charles D’Ambrosio While most of the writing world is in Portland at #AWP19, myself included, taking in panels, readings, and the bookfair with hundreds of exhibitors of presses small and large, there isn’t much we get to see of Portland, the stunning Pacific Northwest landscape with its majestic Shasta [….]
From my reading of the past year, some favorites—here a memoir-in-essays and three story collections. How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays by Alexander Chee “Writing is a way of going to the depth of Being,” wrote Marguerite Yourcenar, and in the sixteen essays that make up Alexander Chee’s 2018 memoir, the author dives deep, [….]
Two New Titles from WTAW Press Northern California’s newest independent press has just released its 2018 titles: Unnatural Habitats and Other Stories, a debut collection by Angela Mitchell, and Hungry Ghost Theater: A Novel, by Sarah Stone. From the publisher: Unnatural Habitats and Other Stories, by Angela Mitchell This collection of seven connected stories set [….]
Women in Their Beds — Gina Berriault To cap off #ShortStoryMonth, my rec this week revisits a collection by one of my favorite story writers, Gina Berriault. Her admirers span Richard Ford, Grace Paley, and Robert Stone, but American fiction writer Berriault may be one of most revered writers you’ve never heard of. Cynthia Ozick [….]
The Empty Family, by Colm Tóibín For #ShortStoryMonth, I’m recapping some favorite story collections—and chief among the story writers I admire is Colm Tóibín. And his 2011 collection, The Empty Family is one I always keep close by, dipping into the pages to take in the voices of its starkly vivid narrators. Tóibín’s stories mine [….]
The Coast of Chicago by Stuart Dybek May is Short Story Month, so this month I’ll be looking at story collections that have thrilled, taught, and changed me. This week, I’m starting with a classic of the contemporary short fiction. I can still recall first reading Stuart Dybek’s classic short story “We Didn’t” in Antaeus [….]
