Notes from a Literary Lad
From: The Collected Short Stories Jean Rhys was the poet laureate of loneliness. Her fiction is characterized by a focus on women who live beyond the conventions of acceptable society – outsiders, marginalized figures who expend their existences, as John
From The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories Joy Williams has never become the household name she deserves to be. Among the cognoscenti, she is spoken of in reverential tones, often in the company of names like Raymond Carver and
From Things We Lost in the Fire “In any major city, minding your own business is a science.” So says hardened, cynical Detective William Somerset to newcomer David Mills in Se7en, David Fincher and Andrew Kevin Walker’s poison pen letter
From Madame Zero The opening story in Madame Zero, British writer Sarah Hall’s second collection of short fiction, is about a married woman who turns into a fox. This is not a metaphor: one afternoon, while on a walk in
From: The Granta Book of the African Short Story There are numerous layers of power dynamics at work – both up front and in the background – in Ugandan author Doreen Baingana’s sly short story “Passion.” Teachers and students. Students
From: The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories Penelope Lively is 85 years old, so it is somewhat unsurprising to find that a number of the stories in her latest short fiction collection – her first in more than two
From The Largesse of the Sea Maiden Reviewing The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, the posthumous story collection by Denis Johnson (who died of liver cancer in May 2017), Michael Schaub identifies what made the author’s writing so singular. “Nobody
From Debris Whenever someone suggests that the writing in a story, novel, or film script resembles recorded speech, one can be reasonably assured the product in question is the work of a consummate stylist. Actual speech transcribed verbatim would be
From The Best American Noir of the Century “The thrill of noir,” writes James Ellroy in the introduction to The Best American Noir of the Century, “is the rush of moral forfeit and the abandonment to titillation.” It’s a doom-saturated
From Going to Meet the Man America was forged in the cauldron of racism. From chattel slavery to Jim Crow, from the Dred Scott case to the doctrine of separate but equal; from Emmett Till to Martin Luther King Jr.,