short stories

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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Book Review: Stories by Korean Women — Sad Brilliant Inventions

April 10, 2016
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What could have been excursions into monochromatic despair are elevated, through resourceful inventiveness, into exhilarating journeys.

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Fuse Book Review: “Beasts You’ll Never See” — Short Stories that Elicit Shrieks of Hilarity

March 25, 2016
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Nate Liederbach demotes plot and Aristotelian mechanics, replacing them with the acrobatics of a beer-loud voice.

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Book Review: “My Brooklyn Writer Friend” — Flashes in the Gloom

January 20, 2016
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Thanks in large part to brevity alone, the way these stories work is closer to poetry than to fiction.

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Book Review: “Half an Inch of Water” — Nine Stories that Peer Memorably into Eternity

September 14, 2015
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One of the hardest things to do as a writer of contemporary fiction is to create characters who are good.

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Book Review: “Counternarratives” — Stories About History’s Metamorphosis

August 5, 2015
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What John Keene has given us in Counternarratives is fearless fiction.

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Book Review: “Young Skins” – The Precariousness of Even a Timid Existence

April 13, 2015
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The events Colin Barrett renders in Young Skins have the texture of life, albeit the darker side, in that they puzzle and disturb and linger painfully.

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