Criticalcompendium
Book Reviews

“In Ma Jian’s 1985 short story collection “Stick Out Your Tongue,” Tibet emerges instead as place of isolation, desperation, and ignorance. Twelve years later, the stories in this reprinted volume are still not only riveting but relevant, even as Chinese control over Tibet has mostly changed from militarism to vacation colonialism.’ Read the review at [...]

“Comprising seven stories and a novella, “Minimal Damage” centers on characters that have disappeared (or will soon disappear) into the cracks . . . Barnes already proved himself as one of today’s best, and unjustly obscure, literary war writers. His 2000 debut collection, “Gunning for Ho,” pulled no punches in depicting the abject horror and [...]

“We may know him best as a novelist, the author of the prize-winning “Independence Day” (1995), and, more recently, “The Lay of the Land” (2006), but Richard Ford is a champion of the short story. A fine story writer himself, Ford has also done his best to encourage us to read more of the genre [...]

“Big names stud the list of contributors to this bold, inviting collection, and readers are bound to see these pages as a guide to the health of contemporary fiction. Zadie Smith explains in her introduction that each contributor was told to “make someone up,” and name the resulting story after that protagonist. Profits will go [...]

“The stories in “The Jew of Home Depot” begin in lightness and even, at times, guarded optimism, but by book’s end, they resolve in muted tragedy. In the last, title story, a Jewish family from Brooklyn relocates to Marshall, Texas, in order to help a wealthy businessman realize his dying wish, to spend his final [...]

“Flying to America’ caps a project by author and bookseller Kim Herzinger to bring Barthelme’s entire opus into print . . . “Flying to America” offers 15 previously uncollected stories, including three never before published, as well as 30 stories left out of Barthelme’s two self-selected anthologies, 60 Stories (1981) and 40 Stories (1987), where [...]

In January 2005, Nadine Gordimer composed obituaries for two friends, Anthony Sampson and Susan Sontag, who died within ten days of each other. Her writing was uncharacteristically stiff, almost numb, as if she’d been forced to comment before she was ready. In “Dreaming of the Dead,” one of the finest stories in her new collection, [...]

“The title of Irvine Welsh’s latest short story collection, ‘If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work,’ suggests something about the tone of the pieces and the characters we’re about to meet. It might suggest that Welsh’s heroes will be tragically distant hipsters, or that the world they inhabit is hopeless (but isn’t it a laugh!). [...]

“This anthology of short fiction is a wonderfully varied exercise in creativity. Without doubt, love looks different in the 21st century: harder, more disposable, subject to the whims of the mobile phone and internet technology, which is ironically frequently referred to here. Love at its most sublime is expressed in short spurts, or through a [...]

Havana Noir is an anthology of short stories — grim, bleak, escapist, violent, sexually charged — set in the collection’s namesake city. The compiled stories are organized into four parts — I: Sleepless in Havana, II: Escape to Nowhere, III: Sudden Rage, IV: Drowning in Silence. Beside the title of each of the short stories [...]

“Wastelands: Stories of Life After Apocalypse collects 23 stories that range in publication dates from 1973 to 2006. Some of the stories have aged more gracefully than others. The questions raised by the powerful allegory of death envisioned as total Apocalypse fall by the wayside as editor John Joseph Adams gives too much leeway to [...]

“She can get kind of irritated,” Elizabeth Crane writes, “with the whole metaphor thing they seem to be all about.” Crane is writing about Betty the Zombie, the eponymous protagonist of the second entry in You Must Be This Happy to Enter, a wickedly smart, hilarious, and ultimately devastating new collection of short stories, out [...]

“Are the 13 short stories in Wanda Coleman’s Jazz and Twelve O’Clock Tales good enough to make white America reassess black America? To paraphrase a typically wry line from the book’s cop-culture parable “Shark Liver Oil,” Coleman knows she has the power to entertain, but only does so hoping “. . . the consciousness of [...]

“It is totally impossible when talking about Rusty Barnes’ stunning collection of short short stories to avoid some kind of “small is beautiful” or “great things come in small packages” cliché. Because with Breaking it Down, not only are the stories very short, but the actual book is vertically-challenged, reaching only half the height of [...]

“The Winds of Marble Arch” — a massive collection of (Connie) Willis’ stories and novellas from the past 20 years or so — is, it must be said, a motley assortment. Some of the pieces (”Daisy, in the Sun,” “All My Darling Daughters”) are fierce, breathtakingly well-crafted satires on a par with George Saunders; others [...]

“Don’t be put off by the strange title, which Jeffrey Eugenides plucked from the Latin poet Catullus’s verse bemoaning having to share his lover’s attention with her pet sparrow. It’s the only off note in this otherwise irresistible anthology of 27 love stories sure to make hearts flutter well beyond Valentine’s Day. My Mistress’s Sparrow [...]

“Steven Millhauser doesn’t traffic in emotional upheaval or interpersonal conflict. Most fiction writers try to make characters seem like real people, but Millhauser flattens them, giving his books the paradoxical effect of seeming realer than reality. For him, meticulous observation does the work of psychology. Millhauser is also our foremost animist: in his stories, mannequins [...]

“The stories in “Dark Roots,” the Australian writer Cate Kennedy’s first collection, are melancholy but deliberate and coolly exact. They depict characters in crisis, often so mired in what Walker Percy called the malaise of everydayness that the horror of their condition is invisible to them. Some of the stories culminate in epiphanies; others hinge [...]