Consider this Baroque idea, the Doctrine of Affections. That a single movement of music should arouse a single emotion. Freehand Books, 2010 It's the perfect title for this collection, for readers can expect a series of intense and diverse emotional responses to each of Paul Headrick's twelve stories. The
In searching for an image for the last story discussed here, "A Wilderness Station", I came upon a wonderfully long and chatty Paris Review interview with Alice Munro.* Something she says about her reading came to mind when I had finished "Spaceships Have Landed". "Reading was my life really until
What a complicated tale. Though perhaps less so than "Open Secrets" and "The Albanian Virgin", for readers have a much broader sense of understanding what "really happened". The possibility of honest understanding, in this case, settles in the last letter that Annie wrote to Sadie. [NOTE: There are some spoilers
Even if you don't subscribe to the digital version of the New Yorker, you can peek at the first two pages of "The Jack Randa Hotel" as it originally appeared in 1993's July 19th glossy pages. 1994; Penguin Modern Classics, 2007 There, readers first met Gail, who "usually
The last story discussed here, "The Albanian Virgin", leaves the reader with a single, haunting question: which version of the events is the reader intended to believe? 1994; Penguin, 2007 Readers are left with uncertainty. Even the narrator does not weigh heavily on either side, indeed, it is
