short stories

Book Review: “The Tree Stand” — Sharply Observed Stories of Hardscrabble Lives

October 19, 2022
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These are compelling stories about the trials and tribulations of dynamic, working-class characters.

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Book Review: “Two Nurses, Smoking” — A Skillful Take on the Times

October 2, 2022
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Many of the short stories in Two Nurses, Smoking are genuinely accomplished, and worth investigating.

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Book Review: “You Have a Friend in 10A” — A Laboratory of a Short Story Collection

June 6, 2022
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You come away from this volume of short stories thinking that sure, Maggie Shipstead does write what she knows — it’s just that she may know everything.

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Book Review: “Treading the Uneven Road” — In Search of Discovery and Understanding

April 12, 2019
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L. M. Brown writes with a sure hand about men and women beset with dreams and longings, who fall in and out of love with each other, and who harbor secrets that shape their lives in unpredictable ways.

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Book Review: Diane Williams, Flash Fiction, and the Shrinking Short Story

November 27, 2018
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Diane Williams’s brusque vision of a perverse life force mesmerizes.

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Book Review: “For Other Ghosts” — Stories that Surprise

October 8, 2018
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The twelve stories in this collection are set in radically different places, use multiple forms, and reflect varying levels of political engagement.

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Book Review: “Your Duck Is My Duck” — Not Enough Tingles

September 25, 2018
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Deborah Eisenberg’s stories pull you in and imitate life in an uncanny way.

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Book Review: Tale of Two Short Story Collections, Schutt and Ortese

May 9, 2018
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Schutt’s is an example of the kind of fiction that is being taken seriously in too many quarters in this new century, but that is not nearly good enough.

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Book Review: Susan Sontag’s Collected Stories — From the Back Burner

March 24, 2018
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Susan Sontag wrote short stories as a hobby; she saved more of her enormous intellectual energy for her novels and essays.

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Book Review: “The Teeth of the Comb” — Brusque Tales of Rebellion

April 17, 2017
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These tales have an incendiary energy, but Osama Alomar handles his narrative explosives with restraint, wisdom, care, and precision.

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