The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40″ short story issue has generated lots of comment, much of it in the why-wasn’t-so-and-so included? category, some of it in the why-wasn’t-I included? category, the best of it in the (sorta) latter category and self-deprecating in a satiric way. And, of course, there was some that made…

[Read more →]

There’s been much blog ado over The New Yorker’s “Summer Fiction: 20 Under 40.” Check out the gnashing here, here and here (we promise to complain more in a later post). However the writers learned their craft, they learned to write first sentences well. In fact, we found the lead sentence…

[Read more →]

Rereading Douglas Coupland’s  Generation X: Tales For An Accelerated Culture reminded this baby boomer how important and, in its way, groundbreaking the book was when published in 1991. Not that it received much attention, despite its title,  at release. No major reviews in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The…

[Read more →]

Storytelling has mysterious, unmeasurable power and storytellers have expended a lot of that power trying to explain it to us. Let me try. Hearing a story is a way of organizing the brain and stimulating thought. Formulating a story is an exercise in ordering thought, making associations and generally “thinking…

[Read more →]

Short story writers are most like magicians, plying their craft with illusion and misdirection. Both want their audiences to believe what they present, to think it as real. They don’t want them to notice or even think about what goes on to make the magic.

Which makes Thomas Lynch a magical…

[Read more →]

In his New York Times review of Justin Taylor’s Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, Todd Pruzan explains how Raymond Carver “advanced a literary genre with ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.’  The movement wasn’t dirty realism or minimalism, but ‘vaguely titled fiction’: stories concealing their intensity and…

[Read more →]

Which is better?  Minimalist and working-class author Raymond Carver’s original manuscripts? Or the stories published after Gordon Lish’s edits? Some 20 years after Carver’s death, the answer has supporters on both sides. It’s the question on which Carol Sklenicka’s big and sometimes frustrating biography of the famous minimalist, working-class writer…

[Read more →]

Said of the 1960s, it’s also true of the 1980s: If you remember them you weren’t there. Reasons to forget? You worked and partied too long and hard and did too many drugs to maintain the rigorous schedule. You’ve repressed the embarrassing struggle to appear above your socio-economic status. And…

[Read more →]

Had your fill of superheroes? Not, we’ll guess, the kind that crowd that pages of this high flying collection. These superheroes are conflicted, confused and, like the rest of us, limited in what they can do. These unlikely tales written by 22 mostly young and twisted authors, give us super…

[Read more →]

It’s the commonly used coffee house criteria to define enjoyable fiction: “I identified with the characters.” If we recognize ourselves or others we know in a story, we’re more susceptible to being drawn in. But the characters in The Book Of Other People, an anthology of character sketches/short stories, aren’t…

[Read more →]