nomadreader

Welcome to Short Story Saturday, a returning semi-regular feature. The project stems from a desire to read more short stories. It's not a secret I prefer novels to short stories, but I'm working to stretch myself as a reader, and part of that will be reading more short stories. When I have read short story collections, I've often found them hard to review as a whole. This feature will allow me to review collections as a whole or separately, but I'll also be reviewing individual stories. The backstory: This Is How You Lose Her, the second story collection from Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner Junot Diaz, was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award . Update: it was also a finalist for the 2013 Carnegie Medal . The basics: This Is How You Lose Her  is a somewhat thematic story collection. The stories are all about love or a relationship to some extent. Most of the stories are narrated by Yunior, the narrator of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao ( my review .)...

Welcome to Short Story Saturday, a returning semi-regular feature. The project stems from a desire to read more short stories. It's not a secret I prefer novels to short stories, but I'm working to stretch myself as a reader, and part of that will be reading more short stories. When I have read short story collections, I've often found them hard to review as a whole. This feature will allow me to review collections as a whole or separately, but I'll also be reviewing individual stories. The basics: The Kissing List  is the debut short story collection by Stephanie Reents. Some of the stories are linked. My thoughts: The first story in the collection "Kissing," sets the stage for the rest of the book. Reents and the female narrators of her stories are young, brazen, fun and wise: "The funny thing about being in your early twenties is that it's a lot like being any other age, except you don't know it." I have a notoriously hard time re...

The backstory: Confession: the first thing I do when I wake up on Monday morning is grab my Kindle and see who wrote this week's fiction selection. Sometimes I'll go on to read it immediately. Sometimes I'll wait until I've had my coffee. This week, however, I was baffled. I'd never heard of Callan Wink, the author. When I flipped to the Contributors page I learned "Callan Wink lives in Livingston, Montana. He is currently pursuing his M.F.A. at The University of Wyoming." I was so excited for Callan Wink, an unknown M.F.A. student in Montana to score a story in The New Yorker . When I tried to find out more about him Monday, this librarian discovered very little. When I tried again on Friday, I was overrun with blog posts and articles about this very story. Cheers to you Callan! The first line: "Sid was a nude sleeper."   My thoughts: One thing I've come to love about reading short stories is how little the subject matters to me. With ...

On my quest to read more short stories, I've found myself reading more collections, as well as more intentionally reading the short stories from The New Yorker . This afternoon, as I sat down to begin Emma Straub's collection of stories, Other People We Married ,  I was struck by the title verso page and its details. Of the twelve stories in this volume, seven had been published previously before. That news in and of itself isn't terribly surprising, especially for a young writer, but it got me thinking. As someone whose short story predilections veer towards interconnected or strongly themes collections, I'm starting to pay more attention to how stories come together. When I started Siobhan Fallon's You Know When the Men Are Gone   ( my review ), I intended to read one story most days, as I'm prone to do. Instead I devoured it like a novel, partially because the stories and characters shared a place and space. Collections from multiple writers, such as th...

Welcome to Short Story Saturday, a semi-regular feature. The project stems from a desire to read more short stories. It's not a secret I prefer novels to short stories, but I'm working to stretch myself as a reader, and part of that will be reading more short stories. When I have read short story collections, I've often found them hard to review as a whole. This feature will allow me to review collections as a whole or separately, but I'll also be reviewing individual stories from a variety of sources. The basics: You Know When the Men Are Gone is a loosely interconnected set of stories about soldiers and their families at Ft. Hood in Texas. My thoughts: Although I'm not always a fan of short story collections, I'm beginning to think I do enjoy collections with a strong theme. After reading so many glowing reviews of this collection, I grabbed it off the shelf at the library one day and started reading. The first (and titular) story was engrossing...

Welcome to the first installment of Short Story Saturday, a new semi-regular feature. The project stems from a desire to read more short stories. It's not a secret I prefer novels to short stories, but I'm working to stretch myself as a reader, and part of that will be reading more short stories. When I have read short story collections, I've often found them hard to review as a whole. This feature will allow me to review collections as a whole or separately, but I'll also be reviewing individual stories from a variety of sources. First up: "Home" by George Saunders, which appeared in the 2011 Summer Fiction issue of The New Yorker. The backstory: When I went to see Karen Russell and Julie Orringer earlier this year , I asked them about who and what they were reading and how their reading habits differed while writing. Both mentioned George Saunders as a perennial source of information. I've never read Saunders (largely because he doesn't write nov...