Notes from a Literary Lad
From Goodbye, Columbus From the beginning, Philip Roth seemed to court controversy. Whether it was feminists railing against his supposed misogyny, puritans scandalized by his frank depictions of sex and his rampant use of profanity, or intimate partners who felt
You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating
From Teardown The signal word in Clea Young’s “Dock Day” is “treason.” In Young’s hands, this term takes on layers of meaning and implication over the course of what is a very short story indeed: unfolding over little more than
From That Was a Shiver When James Kelman won the Man Booker Prize in 1994 for his novel How Late It Was, How Late, the victory was greeted with controversy, not least among the members of the Booker jury. One
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