story collections

Our 2018 Favorite Reads

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, [….]

Litstack Rec: Thunderstruck & Other Stories & Kitchens of the Great Midwest

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 a thing. Just seal [….]

Birthdays

On this day, April 19, in 1900, author, journalist, poet and playwright Richard Hughes was born in Weybridge, Surrey, England. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and, in the US, an honorary member of both the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he was awarded the OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in 1946. Interesting facts: he wrote the world’s first radio play, Danger, broadcast by the BBC in 1924, and he was good friends with poet Dylan Thomas (who wrote Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog while leasing a boathouse from Hughes). He died in 1976, at age 76.

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