Antiquarian and Classic Book Reviews
Short story collections.
Short Story is a genre.
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Sometimes books constructed out of vignettes seem to be built on a faulty foundation and have frames that are not enough to withstand the weight of a message or a book. Firestone here has used the flexibility of very short vignettes to construct just what her title implies — an airless space.
I do love a short novel. Not only do they reliably help me out of even the most prolonged of reading slumps, but short novels are where writers really shine. It takes a lot of skill to craft a narrative that is tight but still full of intent and power.
When you read these stories, it’s easy to start looking for threads of his eventual fate or at least the mental state that led to it. Are they there? Yes, but they are subtle.
A New Tradition Maybe? This year the holiday season proved strangely elusive, and then, when it finally felt like it arrived, it was fraught with problems. Wesker had a bad weigh in. First, my lovely spouse was sick, then I fell ill and am still not well two weeks later. There were so many blizzards. […]
I was expecting, based on the title, to get a collection of purely Christmas, party, winter holiday, or holiday stories here. Instead, the book contains thirteen tales organized by month with two for December. Also? They are not all from the Jeeves and Wooster universe.
Both of these volumes are perfect for a night spent inside in the warmth of the fireside. Easy to get lost in, they are easily finished in a sitting and just begging to be turned over in your head or discussed with your favourite bookish friend.
There’s a lot that Clark has added to these stories (and taken out of them) in order to arrive at the masterpiece of film he has produced. He’s done a lot with the original material.
The thing I love most about Jackson’s short stories is the way that she twists seemingly ordinary events into strange and unsettling directions. You won’t find ghouls and goblins here, but you will find human monsters and ominous atmospheres that leave the reader wondering how things went so wrong and why.
Cloudland Revisited is a hilarious ode to the movies, including all of those bad and cheesy ones that we watch and then wonder why hundreds of people came together to produce such a clunker.
Though the subjects are varied, what remains is Akutagawa’s beautiful starkness and his precise use of prose. There is the feeling that cutting one word would be impossible, but adding one would be a shame.
