Reading the Short Story

Well, it is Independence Day in America and I am celebrating with my family by braving the barbecue grill—complete with corn on the cob, b...

Kevin Barry, Dark Lies the Island , Jonathan Cape . I started this series of blogs on the six shortlisted collections for the 2012 Fra...

Nathan Englander, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank , Knopf. In the spring of 1999, reviewers fell all over themselve...

Etgar Keret, Suddenly a Knock on the Door , Farrar, Straus, and Giroux An irksome impediment to the short-story reader’s pleasure and ...

Sarah Hall, The Beautiful Indifference , Faber and Faber In an interview article ( Metro.co.uk) last November, Sarah Hall, author of ...

Fiona Kidman, The Trouble with Fire , Vintage. With all due respect to Dame Kidman, the honorable judges of the Frank O’Connor Short S...

Lucia Perillo, Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain .  W. W. Norton. I have always tried to be alert about what governs my reaction to...

My favorite book of the six shortlisted for the 2011 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award is Edna O’Brien’s Saints and Sinners ....

I have held Valerie Trueblood’s collection, Marry or Burn, until last because it is my least favorite of the six books shortlisted f or t...