Lynn Coady’s Play the Monster Blind Doubleday-Random House, 2000 Worthlessness. Disappointment. Boredom. Hellishness. Despair. The eleven stories in Lynn Coady’s debut collection (which followed her astonishingly successful debut novel Strange Heaven) are not for the faint-of-heart. Worthlessness, from “A Great Man’s Passing” “It was her fault because she had done
Thanks for the Ride I’m accustomed to thinking of Alice Munro as the chronicler of Lives of Girls and Women, so I was surprised to come upon a male narrator in “Thanks for the Ride”. Dickie is hanging out with his cousin, George, who is three years older, in Pop’s
Back at the beginning of December, the idea of reading Alice Munro’s stories from the beginning, through her most recent collection, Too Much Happiness, just seemed like a good idea. But now that I’ve actually begun. Now that it’s moved from the sphere of the possible to the sphere of
Sarah Selecky’s This Cake is for the Party Thomas Allen, 2010 A lot of readers think of short stories like the crumbs on the cover image of Sarah Selecky’s stories: short stories are what’s left behind when a writer couldn’t make something whole out of an idea, couldn’t serve it
As November's reads settle out, the 2010's reading challenges fall into line, and in quiet moments I am reflecting on the reading year and making bookish plans for 2011. You know how it is? How many bookish promises we readers make to ourselves, before the reader's fickle gaze shifts to
