“How To Be Alone”
I wonder if our current cultural susceptibility to the charms of materialism – our increasing willingness to see psychology as chemical, identity as genetic, and behavior as the product of bygone exigencies of human evolution – isn’t intimately related to the postmodern resurgence of the oral and the eclipse of the written: our incessant telephoning, our ephemeral e-mailing, our steadfast devotion to the flickering tube. Read more
“Tenth of December”
George Saunders is a master short story-teller whose talent is skillfully displayed in The Tenth of December, a collection of ten short stories that was recently published (2013). A writer who seems to be writing about the mundane aspects of life – work, buying a puppy, planning a birthday party, or picking the kids up from school – Saunders is, in fact writing about the big picture: parenting, corporate greed and power, entitlement, human rights, mental illness, and despair. With George Saunders, there is always a message that says something about our culture and what we value and that’s what makes his short stories so thought-provoking, hilarious, and often heart-breaking. Read more 
“The Whore’s Child”
Readers often ask me who my favorite writers are and although the question is tantamount to asking what my favorite foods are (there are many; where should I start?), I usually answer “Jonathan Franzan, John Irving, and Richard Russo” because the trio represents an elite group of writers whose prose never fails to keep my interest. Each author has his own writing style but they all share the traits of great writers – sentence fluency, character depth, memorable word choice, and an interesting story to tell. Read more
“My Father’s Tears”
He was taller than I, though I was not short, and I realized, his hand warm in mine while he tried to smile, that he had a different perspective than I. I was going somewhere, and he was seeing me go. I was growing in my own sense of myself, and to him I was getting smaller. He had loved me, it came to me as never before. It was something that had not needed to be said before, and now his tears were saying it. Read more
“How to Breathe Underwater”
….before I have a chance to really feel like her daughter again, we’re already saying goodbye.
How to Breathe Underwater is a collection of nine short stories written by Julie Orringer. Published in 2003, the book was dedicated in memory to the author’s mother, Agnes Tibor Orringer who died at the age of 46 in 1994 of cancer. Born in Hungary, Agnes Tibor was educated in the United States and grew up to be a doctor, wife, and mother. The author – 21 at the time of her mother’s death – was deeply impacted by her mother’s illness and although the stories are classified as fiction, the reader can’t help but think the author writes from experience.
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“A Good Fall”
Nearly 10 years ago, I read the book Waiting by Ha Jin which won the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. Based on a true story that took place in China, Waiting is the tragic account of a man who enters an arranged marriage out of a sense of duty, not love. He later falls in love with another woman but is restricted from divorcing his wife without spousal consent so he is left to wait for his true love. Ten years after finishing the book and I can still recall feeling the seemingly endless wait for something desired that the author, Ha Jin so strongly conveys in his award-winning novel. In 2009, Ha Jin published A Good Fall – a collection of 12 short stories that center around a different aspect of the Chinese culture – the Chinese immigrant experience in the United States. Read more
“Music Through the Floor”
Music Through the Floor is a collection of ten fictional short stories written by Eric Puchner, a writer and professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College in California. Published in 2005, Music Through the Floor was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and The California Book Award – a tremendous accomplishment for an author’s first publication of short stories. Read more
“Dear Life”
Alice Munro recently published a new collection of short stories entitled Dear Life. A brilliant anthology of 14 short stories with mostly single word titles that signify a key event, description or a character in a story, Dear Life is really two books in one: ten fictional short stories told from the perspective of characters striving to make sense of people in their lives, random events, and the decisions made; and four stories collectively called Finale that Munro says”form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, thought not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last – and the closest – things I have to say about my own life.” Read more
“Aliens In The Prime Of Their Lives”
When I first picked up “Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives,” I thought I was holding a book for young adults when in fact, the 12 short stories are about young people – an under-appreciated mother, a rebellious teen, an angry lover who has been abandoned, a divorced father, a sexually abused teen, a mother who looses a child, and a young boy’s family vacation. There are also the experiences of a father and son at “Bodies: The Exhibition” which showcases preserved human bodies dissected to display bodily functions, a young couple’s adventures in a car, the hunters that become the hunted, and a couple’s last moments on a doomed aircraft. This 263-page book reminded me of the “The Twilight Zone” – the American television series from the early 1960’s that depicted weekly singular episodes of disturbing, paranormal, or futuristic phenomena in seemingly normal day-to-day life. Read more
“Getting A Life”
Several years ago, Helen Simpson published a collection of nine short stories called “Getting A Life.” Simpson, an English novelist is a master at writing about women overwhelmed with their lives as mothers – be they stay at home or working moms – and as wives to men who don’t think their responsibilities go beyond going to work everyday. At times hilarious – especially the scenes with children – but more often sad, the stories portray women in England who are trying to keep their lives, careers, and marriages together while raising children – not an easy feat. Read more
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