Not being a statistician, I am not offering this as a fact, but my sense is that there are more short story collections being published than ever. And given the distortions of time that obtain in our enveloping warp-speed world, one would think that short fiction would be the
The notion that insanity is the only rational response to a mad and maddening world—a notion romantically articulated by exotic psychiatric adventurer and trailblazer R.D. Laing in the euphoric phase of the Vietnam War era (“Insanity: a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world”)—still holds some allure
Having recently resumed my status, as Facebook would state it, of being “in a relationship,” and having adopted a three-month-old Labrador-Australian Cow Dog hybrid named Beny (about whom you will no doubt hear more about in the future), I find myself again more paying attention to the
Integrating the bulletins from the real world (for lack of a better phrase) with the books one chooses to read, and the movies and videos one views, is no small task, especially for dedicated, inveterate readers. As a youth I recall being able to compartmentalize the characters and storylines, or
This seems to be the season for the publication of some of my favorite writers. (Actually, I think every season is.) Alan Furst’s 10th novel, Spies of the Balkans (Random House), quells any fears that the author might be, as they say, phoning it in. Set in Salonika, Greece,
Maybe the only thing you can depend on these days, in what was to have been our brave new world (did I miss it?), is the predictability of those benighted outlets that coalesce to form the corporate behemoth inaccurately labeled “mainstream media.” Articles on beach books or summer reading, which
I must confess I hardly know where to begin in talking about what is destined to be seen as Anthony Julius’s magnum opus: Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford U Press). Julius, who was the defense attorney in the infamous Irving vs. Lipstadt
In that evanescent realm which I think of as my reading experiences there are a handful of writers whose narrative skills move them beyond the increasingly respectable category of so-called “genre fiction” to the seemingly more respected arena of “literary fiction”—Elmore Leonard, George Pelecanos, Charles McCarry, Alan Furst,
Such has been the influence of Chilean novelist Robert Bolaño that every posthumous publication of his ouevre has been hungrily devoured by the growing multitudes of his admirers. Now comes Antwerp, translated by Natasha Wimmer (New Directions), which was written in 1980 but first published in 2002, just before Bolaño’
Though throughout my reading life I would occasionally read short fiction, it wasn’t until I spoke with writer/Florida State University creative writing program head honcho Mark Winegardner that I saw short stories in a different light. In my world—forget me as a college professor and a writer—
