Recalling the distanced and pseudo-analytical view of a man's life in the very short story "Siegfried's Memoirs", readers can contrast that with "Willi", an emotionally driven and heartful short piece. "Willi was a prisoner of war in France until the end of 1948. He dreamed of home, but when he got
Anosh Irani's "Circus Wedding" appears in the Spring/Summer 2017 issue of Eighteen Bridges, a fabulous magazine. His novel, The Parcel, also considers voices which are often pushed to the margins. Here, too, Raju inhabits a precarious existence. Here too, Anosh Irani takes a small character and reveals their big dreams.
"My name is Renée. I am fifty-four years old. For twenty-seven years I have been the concierge at number 7, rue de Grenelle, a fine hôtel particulier with a courtyard and private gardens, divided into eight luxury apartments …" In Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog, readers cosy up
This story falls between some longer ones in Going Ashore, with Mavis Gallant's early and uncollected stories, "One Morning in May" and "A Day Like Any Other". Both stories in which young people's innocence moves into the shadows of experience. In the shorter stories I've been reading lately, "From Gamut to Yalta",
Continuing in the vein of "From Gamut to Yalta" and "Dido Flute, Spouse to Europe", in only four pages, Mavis Gallant presents a cursory view of a life. Background music for Siegfried and Charles Although ostensibly an exercise in objectivity, a writer's imagined review of a man's memoirs,
