Café Shira isn’t simply a place to grab cup of coffee. Oh, no. For many, its meaning is much deeper and far more divine. In David Ehrlich’s novel of the same name, Café Shira is a place where his characters seek transcendence, though not all may succeed in finding exactly what they are looking for. […]
A linked collection is such a readerly pleasure. As each new story begins, the reader is reengaged, figuring out how this featured character is connected to characters met earlier, often considering anew what was already known. The world expands as the book unfolds. In Rachel King’s excellent short story collection, Bratwurst Haven, the twelve stories […]
Night Owls Winner of the 2022 Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction Selected by Ramona Ausubel Photo by Mathew Schwartz Past dusk, Hom releases the squirrel. Huffing and delirious with pain from the BB shot embedded in a hind leg, it limps across the yard, seeking refuge in the shadowy expanse. Clouds disperse, unveiling a […]
The Irish writer Colin Barrett’s second story collection, Homesickness, contains memorable portraits of characters who are caught within the tight strictures of small-town life, uneasily moving ahead while bearing the burdens of their ever-present histories. The stories are mostly set in Mr. Barrett’s birthplace of County Mayo, on the Atlantic coast of Ireland, and while […]
If Colin Fleming’s collection of stories If You [ ]: Fabula, Fantasy, F**kery, Hope fails to make sense in any conventional way, that should come as no surprise. This is very much a collection of stories that reflect the absurd predicaments of our lives right here, right now, in our ongoing Covid and post-Covid reality. […]
Jennifer Fliss jolts the reader awake in her debut collection, The Predatory Animal Ball. She usually does so within the first sentence, which is no small feat given that this collection contains forty pieces of flash fiction. In the opening story, “Pigeons,” the narrator begins: I once saw a pigeon on Third Avenue hobbling around […]
As with pop music and fashion, literature tends to follow the tide of emergent cultural movements, ideas, conflicts, and challenges. Occasionally, as with Ken Kalfus’s latest novel, 2 A.M. in Little America, a work of art looks further ahead, responding to our present moment by imagining a possible future. Ostensibly responding to our own increasingly […]
A Most Generous Offer Photo by Carsten Ullrich i. The apartment in Beijing was Lin’s and mine until Ma made the generous decision of allowing old Mrs. Yang to move in. My sister and I spent our summers there. Lin liked to trample through the weeds caulking the patches around the apartment building, gathering […]
The eight stories in Seeking Fortune Elsewhere, Sindya Bhanoo’s exquisite debut story collection, paint a portrait of characters struggling to make sense of the lives they have been given and trying to figure out what, exactly, lies within their control. The stories take place in India and in the United States, in the late 20th […]
Now You Know It All, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, reads more like a collection of very small novels than a collection of stories, given the breadth, depth, and twists in each offering. It’s not that these tales feel like stories that want to be novels—they are decidedly and perfectly what they should […]