Back at the beginning of December, the idea of reading Alice Munro’s stories from the beginning, through her most recent collection, Too Much Happiness, just seemed like a good idea. But now that I’ve actually begun. Now that it’s moved from the sphere of the possible to the sphere of
Sarah Selecky’s This Cake is for the Party Thomas Allen, 2010 A lot of readers think of short stories like the crumbs on the cover image of Sarah Selecky’s stories: short stories are what’s left behind when a writer couldn’t make something whole out of an idea, couldn’t serve it
Chris Adrian "The Warm Fuzzies" The New Yorker Fiction: 20 Under 40 September 27, 2010 issue Why You Might Choose to Not Read this Post: 1. You don't care for short stories; 2. You think The New Yorker is all pretentious-ish-ness; 3. Anything with the word Fuzzies in it can't
Cynthia Flood's The English Stories Biblioasis, 2009 The end of the first story in Cynthia Flood's collection of interconnected stories goes like this: "Sometimes she took off the lid and put her nose right into the box, to inhale." Readers only met Amanda Ellis nine pages ago, so you might think
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie "Birdsong" The New Yorker Fiction: 20 Under 40 September 20, 2010 issue "She was not merely resting her eyes on the car next to hers, as people often do in Lagos traffic; she was looking at me." It's this look which occasions Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's short story "Birdsong";
