“Model Home”
What an odd thing a family was,…The permutations, like the patterns of a chess game, seemed endless.
The Ziller family – Warren and Camille and their three children: Dustin, Delilah (“Lyle”), and Justin, and Mr. Leonard, an old and arthritic dog – left their hometown of Nashotah, Wisconsin in 1982 to move to a suburban development outside of Los Angeles, California. In pursuit of success and wealth, Warren Ziller invests everything in a real estate development – Auburn Fields – that ends up being adjacent to a dump. Three years later (1985) Warren has lost everything but is afraid to tell his family who all seem to be completely unaware of what is going on around them. Read more 
“How We Die”
We rarely go gentle into that good night.
Several weeks ago while listening to “Fresh Air” on NPR, the topic was Sherwin Nuland – a surgeon, writer, and educator who died on March 3, 2014 at 83 years old. Nuland was the author of How We Die, an informative and groundbreaking book that describes death in both its clinical and biological terms in such a way that the reader doesn’t have to have a medical degree to understand the process. Published in 1994, How We Die won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Read more
“My Gentle Barn”
At the core of every human being is a resilience that buoys us back to the surface of life. With every painful loss or setback that brings us crashing to our knees, we find some way to keep breathing and move forward.
My Gentle Barn is the story of how one young girl made her dream come true. Ellie Laks grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family whose members didn’t understand who she was or what made her tick. Told to be quiet, help her mother, and subjugate herself to adults and males in particular, Ellie was a lonely and angry child who didn’t know why her family put her in a box where she didn’t belong and blamed her when she was victimized. Turning to animals – and especially those who needed help – Ellie found solace, compassion, and understanding in the creatures she shared a special connection with. Looking back as an adult, Ellie writes:
“Friendly Fire”
..honey, this is life. You learn to live with guilt. You do the best you can. Believe me, you don’t get away with anything in this life. You’re going to pay the price, so you make sure you get your money’s worth.
Friendly Fire, a collection of 11 short stories written by Kathryn Chetkovich was awarded the John Simmons Short Fiction Award from the University of Iowa. Although 16 years have passed since the book was published, this treasury of short stories is as relevant today as when they were first read in 1998. Forthright but with a subtle message and often open-ended, these stories don’t have twists or imply completion primarily because the stories deal with tough issues: envy, irony, dishonesty, loyalty, teenage angst, aging, friendship, marriage, love, lust, and responsibility – highly charged emotions that inspire loose ends and don’t take well to predictability. Read more
“Disgrace”
One can punish a dog, it seems to me, for an offence like chewing a slipper. A dog will accept the justice of that: a beating for a chewing. But desire is another story. No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts.
Such is the limited reasoning ability of David Lurie, a middle-aged (52) White South African man who spends his days as an adjunct professor at Cape Technical University in Cape Town where he teaches introductory communications courses which bore him and leave him with nothing but contempt for the students he regards as ignorant. That a dog has a desire to chew or that some instincts, if acted upon, should be punishable acts doesn’t seem to occur to Lurie, a twice divorced serial womanizer who chalks his desires up to instinct and therefore not something he should be sorry for. Read more
“The Interestings”
From this day forward, because we are clearly the most interesting people who ever lived, because we are just so fucking compelling, our brains swollen with intellectual thoughts, let us be known as The Interestings. And let everyone who meets us fall down dead in our path from just how fucking interesting we are. Read more
“Safe As Houses”
Safe As Houses is a collection of short stories written by Marie-Helene Bertino and winner of The Iowa Short Fiction Award (2012). The title of the book – Safe As Houses – signifies what most of us believe a home should be: a haven from the outside world where families celebrate holidays and display refrigerator art and framed photographs, but Bertino shows the reader that home can also be a house that is wiped away in an instant, a place we flee from, or a prison in which we lock the world out. Despite the general belief that people are safe in their homes, the truth can be entirely different because what makes a house a home is its inhabitants, not the brick and mortar – and people can be dangerous. Read more
“The Woman Upstairs”
I’ve finally come to understand that life itself is the Fun House. All you want is that door marked EXIT, the escape to a place where Real Life will be; and you can never find it. No: let me correct that. In recent years, there was a door, there were doors, and I took them and I believed in them, and I believed for a stretch that I’d managed to get out into Reality – and God, the bliss and terror of that, the intensity of that: it felt so different – until I suddenly realized I’d been stuck in the Fun House all along. I’d been tricked. The door marked EXIT hadn’t been an exit at all. Read more
“The Goldfinch”
Maybe sometimes – the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want to be. Or, spin it another way, sometimes you can do everything wrong and it still turns out to be right?”…this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can’t get there any other way?” Read more
“If I’d Known You Were Coming”
Everybody needs somebody. Just one other person who is as faithful to them as they are to themselves.
Winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award (the John Simons Short Fiction Award) in 2013, If I’d Known You Were Coming is a collection of 12 short stories written by Kate Milliken. Although each story stands alone, many of the colorful characters reappear in several of the narratives which makes parts of the book appear to be a novella. The common theme that runs through all the stories is the dysfunctional characters – people who abandon or neglect their children, chase addictions, skirt responsibility, or succumb to their fears or desires – whose flaws impose great harm upon others.
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