Trevor Berrett “The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979” is the third story in Karen Russell’s second short story collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove. For an overview with links to review of the others stories in this collection, please click here. This story was originally published in Tin House (as “The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach”; I have … Read more
Trevor looks at “The Time of Death,” a particularly painful story from Alice Munro’s first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades.
Today the winner of The Story Prize, a prize established in 2004 to honor short story collections, was announced. Battleborn, by Claire Vaye Watkins The other two finalists were: Stay Awake, by Dan Chaon This Is How You Lose Her, by Junot Díaz
I was not a fan of the 2011 Booker Prize and its judges’ quest for “readability,” which they defined as something that “zipped along.” It seemed everyday there was a new article criticizing the prize and the judges, and it all completely overshadowed the books. One of the responses was the inception of a new … Read more
Callan Wink’s “One More Last Stand” was first published in Granta 122: Betrayal. Callan Wink first came to my attention when he published his first story in, of all the lucky places, The New Yorker. “Dog Run Moon” proved to be an exciting glimpse at what Wink had to offer. Then around a year later, another … Read more
The twenty titles on the longlist of the Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) were announced: A Trick I Learned from a Dead Man, by Kitty Aldridge Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson The Marlowe Papers, by Ros Barber The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, by Shani Boianjiu Gone Girl, by Gillian … Read more
Trevor and Betsy discuss “An Ounce of Cure,” from Alice Munro’s first story collection, Dance of the Happy Shades.
I discovered Tavares late last year with his fantastic riffs collected in The Neighborhood (my review here). Over the past few years, though, Dalkey Archive has been publishing the pieces to another of his projects, the four-book Kingdom series. The first book of that series has yet to be translated (apparently they are loosely connected, … Read more
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Checking Out” was originally published in the March 18, 2013 issue of The New Yorker. Trevor I’ve never really enjoyed Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s stories. I’ve never read her novels and in fact have wondered whether … Read more
Karl Ove Knausgaard had published two novels before, in a genuine attempt to exhaust everything, he embarked on an ambitious literary projects at the age of thirty-nine: a six-volume series of autobiographical novels that totals around 3600 pages. Not only that, he intentionally wrote the books quickly, in around three years, forsaking style in an effort to stay … Read more