When Megan Mayhew Bergman’s Birds of a Lesser Paradise is good, it’s very good. When it’s so-so, a bland and calculated sense of formula creeps into the equation. Luckily, that doesn’t happen enough to be…
Posts tagged Short stories
The (too much) Fun Parts
I’m testing a theory that where you fall on the Lipsyte-ometer can be determined by what this passage does to the reading parts of your brain — specifically the last sentence: “Ypsilanti was easy to…
The pages from my mind are stripped
The titles of Karen Russell’s books make my brain do a kind of Weird-Al-esque karaoke. I like to believe this has more to do with Russell’s imaginative stories infiltrating my brain than anything else. When…
The Beautiful Indifference
I like my lit a little mucky. I like to wince, look away from a page, close an eye and sneak a peek. I like it when pretty is hip-checked, when a scene gets manure…
Sorry Please Thank You
Charles Yu is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. Last year I gushed over the time travel repairman in his mind-bending How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and now I’m going…
Best American Short Stories as a textbook
I’m trying to become a short story writer, or better yet a novelist, and it is tricky. I don’t know what’s good. I don’t know if I’d read my own work if my work was…
When It Happens to You
I’ve always thought that in order to be a writer of fiction, you would have to be at least a somewhat competent actor. It would make it easier to sync dialogue and gestures, to envision…
Other People We Married
I love Emma Straub. I love that she is a bookseller. I love her blog. I like when she takes to the pages of The Wall Street Journal to tell writers how to win the…
Stay Awake (don’t go to sleep)
The characters in Dan Chaon’s short story collection Stay Awake are quiet. They have experienced loss: a person, themselves, or a ring finger that popped off after a nasty spill from a ladder. Maybe they…