Little Weirds by Jenny Slate
I started Jenny Slate’s collection of essays on the morning of New Year’s Day on my way to meet my friend for one of those polarizing NYC boutique fitness classes. The nature of the book makes it easy to fly through vignettes and I was not having a great feeling about it as I got off the subway. I couldn’t believe I was going to start out the new year with a DNF. I was already trying to justify it in my head, “Perhaps 2020 […]
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness by Richard Yates
This is the first collection by the mostly novelist Richard Yates. This collection has that feel of a first collection, paired as it were, with the first release of a novel as well. And what is successful about this collection is whether or not intended, the effect is that of a whole collection with a set of familiar and consistent theme or at least motifs running through the stories. The stories in part feel a lot like the kinds of New Yorker style, post MFA […]
Reader, I Married Him by Tracy Chevalier (editor)
Reader, we all know how we feel about Jane Eyre. We also know how we feel about that fateful sentence: Reader, I married him. This collection of 21 stories, created to celebrate Charlotte Bronte’s 200th birthday in 2016 and written by an all-female team of authors, all have strong feelings on the matter as well, and these stories run the gamut from the reverent to the satirical. This collection is a jewelry box in your grandmother’s attic full of treasure and cheap pieces alike, and […]
Night Shift by Stephen King
OK never mind, here’s one more review for the year. This is a collection of early Stephen King, and it’s his second collection. It’s also the collection that a) scared living hell out of me as a kid — maybe entirely from that creepy original mass market cover I put in this post, and b) was trawled for any imaginable movie they could make from it. While Skeleton Crew came out first, this is the one that has many many bad movies as a result. So, […]
Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins by Emma Donoghue
Familiar stories are passed, one by one, from one storyteller to another. There are thirteen tales in Kissing the Witch; some will be immediately recognizable, some will require you to dust off your mental library, and some are fantastically new- conjured from collective memory and superstition but new none the less. Each tale is handed off from teller to teller; frequently the perceived villain will be the heroine of the following story. Most are, to quote Emmylou Harris, “full of heartbreak and desire”. She sings that […]
Stories of your Life by Ted Chiang
I read the second Ted Chiang collection of stories, Exhalation, earlier this year and thought it was very good. But I would be lying if I said I recalled a lot of the specific stories. I think this one will prove to be similar. I think the experience of the stories was riveting, but the consequences will be slight. All of this in light of the fact that I also think this story collection is also very good. So there’s a long section of author’s notes […]
