For years I’ve had issues with short story collections. The whipping from one plot to another so quickly makes my brain feel like it’s on a very shaky roller coaster. But it’s the genre my mentor most likes to teach, so I’ve found myself reading a lot of it lately. Thanks to his patience, I have a newfound understanding of the short story, and decided to start off the year by revisiting the first short story collection I ever finished, Neil Gaiman’s “Smoke and Mirrors.” […]
A nice little Dresden Files snack.
I really like these story collections because I don’t have the patience to track them all down in their various anthologies. Extremely convenient, thumbs up. And to top it all off, I really enjoyed all the stories here. There were a couple in the last collection I was a little bored with, or that showed their age, etc. But they were all good here, entertaining and fit well into the larger Dresden Files universe. I especially liked that three of them took place after the […]
“Happiness? He wasn’t even sure what that meant.”
Sometimes a year feels fast, and sometimes a year feels slow. Sometimes a year feels like both! That’s been my year with Murakami. It feels like he’s always been a favorite author of mine, but when I look back, I hadn’t read a word of his until early this year. Now I average a Murakami book every couple of months. This particular book is different than the previous works I’ve read simply because it’s not a novel. It’s a collection of seven stories about, you […]
Add Friday Black to your Black Friday shopping list!
[BINGO #2!] In this most holy month of guerrilla bargain shopping which begins with the Happy Holiday season of Black Fridays and Cyber Mondays, I couldn’t think of a better book to review than Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Both Roxanne Gay and George Saunders are singing the praises of this fresh young author, and everyone should be reading this outstanding collection of short stories. Adjei-Brenyah’s tales whipsaw between dystopian near futures of shopping madness in “Friday Black,” where stores just pile up the dead bodies so […]