Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant When the great story writer Mavis Gallant died, I thought of a story from her 2002 collection, Paris Stories, “Mlle. Dias de Corta.” Mademoiselle is the boarder of a financially strapped Parisian widow, a distant yet fascinating immigrant actress who withholds secrets but whose actions […]
Selected Stories, by William Trevor A volume of stories by William Trevor is a reader’s must-have, and this 2009 collection brings together some of the great writer’s best—48 classic stories, many of which were first published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and literary magazines such as Glimmer Train and the […]
Thunderstruck & Other Stories, by Elizabeth McCracken Early on in Elizabeth McCracken’s extraordinary story collection, Thunderstruck, a grieving mother instructs her seventeen-year-old son to seal up the room of his dead sister. This, she imagines will somehow purge the house of the evil that caused her daughter’s lymphoma. “Don’t touch […]
If you’re devoting some of your stay-at-home to a work-in-progress, here are three classics of writing craft to see you through. Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them, by Francine Prose In this collection, comprised of a series […]
Ship Fever: Stories by Andrea Barrett The eight stories in Andrea Barrett’s 1996 story collection, which won that year’s National Book Award for fiction, run from historical to contemporary settings, yet there is an essential and unifying voice. Like Edward P. Jones, Jim Shepard, and Hilary Mantel, authors whose work […]
WTAW Press 2019 Titles WTAW Press released two great titles in 2019, Chimerica, the debut novel from Anita Fellicelli, and Like Water and Other Stories, the English-language debut of Olga Zilberbourg, Both titles are available as ebooks, here. In Chimerica, by Anita Felicelli, down-on-her-luck Tamil American trial lawyer Maya Ramesh […]
The Dead Fish Museum: Stories, by Charles D’Ambrosio Charles D’Ambrosio’s 2006 story collection The Dead Fish Museum, is set in the Pacific Northwest landscape with its majestic Shasta Cascade mountain range, conifer forests, and crisp air, a setting that informs place, and character. Of the author, and this book, Michael […]
Arranged Marriage: Stories, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni The eleven stories in Arranged Marriage reveal Chitra Banerjee Divrakaruni’s gift for chronicling female cultural dislocation and the compound identities that come with leaving one place, and its engrained customs and beliefs, for another. An acclaimed poet, novelist, Divakaruni portrays Indian-born women and […]
WTAW Press has just released its 2019 titles, Chimerica, the debut novel from Anita Fellicelli, and Like Water and Other Stories, the English-language debut of Olga Zilberbourg. In Chimerica, by Anita Felicelli (Love Songs of a Lost Continent), down-on-her-luck Tamil American trial lawyer Maya Ramesh fights to save a painted […]
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 […]
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.