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 number of different perspectives. Kalman looks at how family turmoil affects…
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 characters and settings connect across the stories. The Settling Earth does…
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 big reader of short stories normally, but I’m coming to appreciate…
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 future post-apocalyptic world where most of the continents are now underwater. …
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 issues, bullying, friendship, parenthood, and therapy, just to name a few. …
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 across a range of times and locations. A number of the…
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 review a book of short stories, but in this book you…
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 stories written from the perspective of men serving in the U.S.…
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 world of the folk tale, the wonder tale, and the long-ago…
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 in the small town of Crosby, Maine, and Olive is the…
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 novellas that seem more for marketing purposes than to further the…
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 time and place, a small settler’s community in New Zealand in…
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