Though each segment could be read as a standalone, each is So Much a Part of the Landscape that Polly Dugan's work is best read all-in-a-burst. Little Brown & Company, 2014 More trust is required on the reader's part than, say, with Carrie Snyder's more prominently linked The Juliet
In collection reading, since Quarterly Stories: Winter 2013 I've read Susie Moloney's Things Withered, the latest installment of the Alice Munro reading project, B.J. Novak's One More Thing, and the most recent volume of Journey Prize stories. But mostly I've been dipping into single stories in recent months. Partly this was inspired by random samplings of the latest ReLit
With book in hand, readers will know this is a collection of short fiction marketed as horror stories. But that's a broad stroke; Dracula and The Stand are both frightening tales. In the hands of Susie Moloney, a horror story sometimes means gruesome and moist: "Brains and cranial fluid seeped
I am fond of specific Alice Munro collections: A Friend of My Youth because it was my first, Open Secrets because it was the impetus for a particularly good book club discussion some years ago, and Runaway. McClelland & Stewart, 2004 Runaway because I have a memory of reading it
Random House, 2013 The slippery question of time is often posed on the page. And with books, it’s different. In music, listeners are engaged at a pace dictated by the composer’s notation, beats counted as the bars pass, the audience arriving synchronously at the end of the piece.
