This Is How You Lose Her is a series of short stories that deal mostly with men’s infidelity in relationships, with the exception of one of the stories being from a women’s point of view. Readers of Diaz’s first book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, will recognize Yunior, who appears repeatedly in the stories in relationships with different women. A running theme throughout these stories is how men don’t often see women as a real person. Like Yunior’s dog brother, Rafa, who sees […]
Enchanting stories from another world
Thirty-third book reviewed as part of the 130 Challenge. This one I got from Utkarsha Kotian. It’s a really rare book, but Utkarsha is my go-to person for rare books. So, after having received the book from her, I promptly got down to reading it. That wasn’t so hard considering that there were only 4 storied to read. But each of those stories was really simple and enchanting. Gulzar is a highly accomplished lyricist and scriptwriter and I’ve always wanted to read him. This was my […]
Cringeworthy Media
I don’t read a lot of (traditionally published, anyways) short stories – I tend to like my fiction long-form, give plots a chance to percolate, characters a chance to truly develop. It’s probably more to do with the way I write – never say in three sentences what you could meander on about for three pages – but I’ve always been sort of baffled by writers who could condense their writing into these bite-sized little chunks. The thing about about not particularly searching out short […]
To Infinity and Back – Sci Fi fantasy short story collection by the Earthsea lady. Some of it entertaining, some weird, all thought provoking.
My husband picked this book up when he went out to get the Earthsea books (which he still has not read all the way through, I married a heathen). There are copious author’s notes that gave me an insight into LeGuin’s writing. She writes of the “psychomyth” as her main story type which greatly helped me in not trying to understand the stories in a rational sense but to let myself feel what the reading of them engendered. This book was engrossing and each piece […]
The Willa Cather of Siberia?
Writer Kseniya Melnik moved with her family from Magadan to Alaska when she was 15. In this collection of short stories, she deftly introduces readers, who most likely are unfamiliar with Siberia — home of the Gulag prison camp system, to the people of the cold and remote city of Magadan in the Russian Northeast. The stories are set in the post-Stalin years, from the 1950s with the Khruschev thaw, through the Brezhnev stagnation and into the age of Glasnost and Perestroika. These are not […]
Dresden Files in short story format
This collection of stories from Butcher’s famous The Dresden Files are a nice discovery for someone who thought she had read all of Harry Dresden’s adventures and had to sit and twiddle her thumbs until Butcher’s inspiration—or publisher—next strikes. The stories range from Butcher’s first-ever Dresden story written as a college assignment to a post-Harry reminiscence, of a sort, by his would-be lover. The thing that makes these stories such fun is that they are written from various perspectives, including that of his enigmatic vampire […]