Butler’s work helps us see how time is a spiral, how the present moment is always layered with multiple pasts and underlying alternate futures.
Tag: Short Story
B-Sides: Edward P. Jones’s “All Aunt Hagar’s Children”
A Jones story can break just about every writing workshop edict in its handling ...
American Storyteller
What makes American life meaningful? Apple products? Cat videos? Torrential pornography? The prospect of a lavish retirement? The senior prom? Forestalling your plunge into poverty? Prescription ...
“The Sandman” @200
In 1816, only four years after the Brothers Grimm brought out a collection of fairy tales carefully selected and edited for the use of children, E. T. A. Hoffmann published his “Nutcracker and Mouse ...
God Walks Into a Bar
One of the stories in Joy Williams’s Ninety-Nine Stories of God finds Franz Kafka triumphantly addressing a fish at a public aquarium. He has just become a vegetarian, and thus finally feels his ...
Weekend Reading: Memory Lane
One day we won’t be covered in snow. But not just yet, it seems. While we wait, here’s your weekend reading. NBC’s Brian Williams has found himself in hot water over his account of being shot ...
Short Cuts: New Stories from Mantel, Moore, and Galchen
When “a skillful literary artist has constructed a tale,” writes Edgar Allan Poe, he “has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a ...
Behind the Dungeon Master’s Screen
From Dickens’s David Copperfield and Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus to Elena Ferrante’s Elena Greco, we are familiar with the fictional protagonist as novelist, or as novelist-to-be. Recently, 40 years ...
Jean Stafford, Antisocialite
Alice Munro’s Nobel Prize last fall was hailed as a victory for the novel’s neglected stepsister, the short story. What struck me most about Munro’s win was how well she has fared by following a ...
Story Time
For a few weeks at the start of 2013, George Saunders was the gently puzzled face of American letters. You could see him being interviewed by Stephen Colbert, Charlie Rose, or George Stephanopoulos ...