Tired of buying electronics or golf gadgets for Father’s Day. Hook your father figure up with a sweet read this month instead. Even if the men in your life don’t have the attention span for a novel or memoir, they will enjoy these powerful literary shorts…but old and new. Warning: These are so good, you might […]
Three Must-Read Short Story Collections
Small Displacements Nails Turning Points in Characters’ Lives
Click to Buy Small Displacements Review by Donna Meredith When I was given Vanessa Furse Jackson’s short story collection Small Displacements, I almost sent it back. I’m glad I didn’t. I don’t often warm up to short stories the way I do to novels, perhaps because I don’t get to spend enough time […]
Dream Fishing, by Scott Ely
Reviewed by Adele Annesi Novelist, ex-soldier and short story fisher king Scott Ely offers an extraordinarily memorable catch in his latest collection, Dream Fishing. From the appropriately accessible “Wasps,” with its comparatively youthful voice and subject, to the profound “Guatemala City,” Ely continually casts his stories in deeper waters. His sometimes untidy but probing prose […]
The End of a Good Party, by Jean Ross Justice
Review by Peter Schmitt Through blood and marriage, Jean Ross Justice figures among one of America’s most distinguished literary families: her sister is poet Eleanor Ross Taylor, wife of fiction writer Peter Taylor; and her husband was the Miami-born poet Donald Justice, who died in 2004. And while only obliquely autobiographical, it is the endless […]
Perpetual Care: Stories by James Nolan
Review by Sean Ennis New Orleans as a city is complicated, and has become even more so over the past five years. Countless narratives have emerged since Katrina describing the city’s joys and plights, and surely more will come from the recent oil spill in the Gulf. And it is difficult to discuss James […]