Tag: Short Stories
Review: Tiny Shoes Dancing and Other Stories by Audrey Kalman
This book of short stories by Audrey Kalman really resonated with me. The stories are different but deal with common issues, most related to marriage and family. Divorce was a frequent story element, and it was really interesting to see divorce explored from a…
Top Ten Short Story Collections
This week’s Top Ten Tuesday, hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, is about favorite short stories and novellas. I don’t read a lot of novellas, but I’ve really warmed in recent years to the genre of short stories. I love short story collections where the…
Review: Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
It’s tempting to compare this book to What it Means When A Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah. Both are debut short story collections from diverse authors, and both blend contemporary and speculative fiction. I enjoyed both, and I’m not a…
Review: What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah
I loved this book of short stories. Arimah has a really vivid way of telling a story, and her stories covered a wide range of issues and genres. The title story was one of the most interesting. The narrator is a mathematician in a…
Review of Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires
I enjoyed this book more than I expected to, mainly because the stories are a surprising combination of everyday life, tragedy, and humor. The stories focus on black identity in a powerful way, but this is far from a one-issue book. Thompson-Spires covers body…
Artefacts and Other Stories by Rebecca Burns
This is the third collection of stories by author Rebecca Burns, after Catching the Barramundi and The Settling Earth. Like The Settling Earth, these are short glimpses into interesting characters and situations, each one leaving the reader wanting more. Unlike The Settling Earth, the stories take place…
Some Possible Solutions by Helen Phillips
If you thought The Beautiful Bureaucrat was a strange book, Helen Phillips’ new book of short stories is even stranger, but it’s a really fun, and memorable read. These are short stories, almost vignettes in some places, experimental in others. It’s always hard to…
Redeployment by Phil Klay
This book was one of my favorite reads this year. It’s a difficult subject to read about. But it’s very worth the effort. Redeployment was written by Phil Klay and won the National Book Award for fiction last year. It’s a collection of short…
Stone Mattress: Nine Tales by Margaret Atwood
It’s always exciting to get a new Margaret Atwood, and this one didn’t disappoint, although it’s very different from her recent MaddAddam trilogy. Stone Mattress is a book of nine short stories. Atwood says they are really “tales” and are meant to “evoke the…
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
Olive Kitteridge won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, and the basis for a recent miniseries starring Frances McDormand. It’s a book that falls somewhere between a novel and short stories, a trend I’m seeing a lot of lately. The stories take place…
Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson by Patricia Briggs
Patricia Briggs is my favorite “series” writer. I try to read everything she writes, and that’s unusual for me. I mostly read a few books from a series and then move on to another one, and I ignore all the extra short stories and…
The Settling Earth: Short Stories by Rebecca Burns
Last year I read Rebecca Burns’ collection of short stories, Catching the Barramundi, and I was so wowed by it I was happy to receive her latest work for review. The Settling Earth is a collection of short stories all set in the same…
