Well. Now Doug Dorst is just showing off. The relative newbie to the world of book glue’s new collection of short stories The Surf Guru, is so fun, so clever, and so so exciting that it will make people who play with words drool. Reading his series of twelve tales is like watching a contortionist bend and shape shift, and [...]

University of Minnesota Duluth professor Linda LeGarde Grover’s The Dance Boots is an interconnected short story collection about indigenous families from the fictional Mozhay Point Indian Reservation set in northern Minnesota. Spanning several decades in the twentieth century, the stories of the families in The Dance Boots show the disturbing reality many indigenous families deal with on a regular basis: [...]

A.M. Homes seems to have assembled the stories in The Safety of Objects with an eye toward pushing the envelope. Sometimes, she pushes that envelope too far, but she does so in the interest of creating a potent sampler of abnormality. All the entries in The Safety of Objects are weird and provocative. Homes’ writing is so un-frilly, so devoid [...]

When Michael Schaub and the Largehearted Boy started raving about Emma Schaub’s Fly-over State on Twitter, it took me roughly 48 seconds to order up the book. That kind of hype cannot be withstood. Besides, nobody has influenced my reading over the past few years more than they have. It was high hopes and an open heart that I dove [...]

Birds of America reaffirmed my belief that Lorrie Moore has great abilities as an observer and describer of things, but less talent as a storyteller. Every entry in this collection of short stories feel very much the same to me. Almost every one begins with a sad woman who only gets sadder as the story continues. The names change, but [...]

Hours after finishing “Gravity” one of the stories in John Jodzio’s debut story collection If You Lived Here You’d Be Home Already, I met with my writing group. As we talked about what we were reading at home, I started in with a rushed and breathless description of the story. “It’s about this guy who is obsessed with throwing pennies [...]

The biggest reason I like T.C. Boyle is that he’s just weird enough. Too often, authors concoct characters so strange or extreme they seem just like what they are – fiction. Wild Child, Boyle’s most recent collection of short stories, displays his knack for giving the reader characters ordinary enough to be relatable, yet unusual enough to merit being the [...]

DISCLAIMER: I’m not much on short stories, and I’ll admit that I’m using a generalization here, but so many of them are too something. Like contrived edginess for the sake of being edgy. Like a tribal tattoo on the small of your back, but you don’t know what the symbol means. And other times they just don’t feel satisfying. They [...]

I remember breathlessly telling my twelve-year-old niece, Jaycie, that if Amy Bloom’s name were on the cover of a phone book I’d read it and enjoy every line. I’m a bit of a Bloom fan, and still remember buying her first novel Love Invents Us in hardcover at the B. Dalton in the Eden Prairie Mall just because I liked [...]

Laura van den Berg writes beautifully. Her sentences and paragraphs feel like gauzy, ethereal dreams. It’s the kind of writing that seems effortless which means it probably took great amounts of effort. She populates the stories of What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us with people on quests for mythical creatures — bigfoot, Nessie the [...]