New York Stories – 4/5 Stars I read Elizabeth Hardwick’s collected essays earlier this year. I also read her novel Sleepless Nights last year. This is a collection of stories that encompasses about 45-50 years worth of short stories edited and selected by Darryl Pinckney, another novelist and critic who also famously worked with and was friends with Hardwick. I read these stories in a variety of orders, and since they are not part of an intentional collection this blending and mixing up of the […]
Suddenly, he felt a paradoxical sense of loyalty…
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how to talk about 98 short stories written over 40 years. But this was an interesting and exhausting reading experience. There’s a lot going on here. So to begin at the beginning, JG Ballard was a British science fiction writer, known mostly to me via the 1995 David Cronenberg movie Crash and the Stephen Spielberg’s movie Empire of the Sun. A few years ago I saw the trailer for High Rise and was blown away. The movie itself is not […]
Of course it would cost something, but he was an expert in cutting corners; and when there were no more corners left he would make circles rounder.
The Magic Barrel – 5/5 Stars This story collection came out in 1959 and contains the well known title story, but also has several other very good stories. It won the National Book Award as well. As I have previously stated in reviews, the age of the writer (here in a kind of debut effort) lends itself to an already mature and thoughtful work (this was also true for many of Raymond Chandler’s stories as well as the story collection A Lucky Man by Jamel […]
The Audiobook is Amazing!
One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories by B.J. Novak My rating: 4 of 5 stars “One More Thing” by B.J. Novak is a funny, dark, cynical, deep, well-written collection of short stories. I highly recommend listening to the audiobook because several famous comedians/celebrities and Novak himself read the stories. While there’s a grab bag of different tones throughout the stories, there’s several stories that have a real grit to them. While sometimes this grit is housed in some absurd scenarios, there’s no mistaking that […]