Short Stories Book Reviews

Cate Baum, editor of SPR reviews SPR Awards Shorts winner Searching For Paradise by Gerard Marconi.

It is rare that a male American writer writes about his feelings and experiences in relation to others, especially women. Offerings over the years have been rather narcissistic perspectives in the form of Kerouac, Thompson and Bukowski, with females no better off than a hatstand. We never really learn how the male protagonist feels about the women in their stories, past the sexual attractiveness or hysteria of each one, and god forbid we learn his weaknesses.

Enter Gerard Marconi, author of Searching For Paradise […]

This slim volume of short stories works as something of a fugue on grief and loss, featuring fragile women at both ends of their adult lives. Strangely, the two stages are not that different, at least not for these women, and that is perhaps the saddest thing in these rather sad stories.

The characters in these stories are, for the most part, weak, wispy women—widows adrift, and vaporous young women with overbearing mothers (more than once called dragons)—who seem not so much unable to cope as unable to navigate when the men in their lives abandon them or, more often, […]

Philip Gaber’s new anthology “Epic Sloth – Tales of The Long Crawl”  yet again hits the mark with post-Postmodern American writing. There isn’t much of this sort of literature around any more and this stuff needs to exist. From Kerouac to Selby to Yates to Palahniuk, Gaber pulls together the sum of these writers to pour out anew what it means to be a young disillusioned man in today’s America.

There is a sure East Coast,  self-effacing vibe to this writing, but there are tales set all over the US with all kinds of people involved. Young Americans seem to […]

My Friend, Freedom is a short story by emerging author Peter Eliot, set in futuristic, Dystopian London, following the life of Yakimoto, a Japanese immigrant, whose life is left in ruin after a failed attempt at blackmail with a shady corporation. In a time where money is everything, challenging such a huge power is certain suicide, but Yakimoto has had unusual dreams; telling dreams…

The grim sci-fi/cyberpunk setting is reminiscent of something between now and the setting of Blade Runner, with a feel of Noir without an observant detective but rather an aging, drug-addicted businessman stuck on the streets of […]

In an oft riffed on passage, Blaise Pascal—probably himself riffing on Pliny the Younger— wrote, “I made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.” Diane Dunning, the author of the novella The River Secrets, took the time to write a small collection of very short fiction (the selection “The Sun Always Wins” is only 128 words). This is much harder than it looks, and Dunning has pulled it off with style. In the introduction she explains that these stories are popular posts from her blog, selections she describes as “entertaining reading for […]

This book is a collection of interconnected stories about just what the title says: old people. The loosely connected characters recur throughout the stories. One couple, Sam and Evie Jokel, are the primary characters, and they anchor the stories. The stories follow the Jokels from their retirement to Sam’s eventual move to The Rest Place, a retirement community in Boulder, but include many stories about other characters. Though the stories cover several years, the book is nicely organized from winter to winter, ending on New Year’s Day, reflecting the metaphor of life as one calendar year.

The first story, “Guilt […]

This charming slice of life from autobiographical writer Ted Olinger, set in Washington State’s Key Peninsula at the bottom of Puget Sound, is truly flavorful. Beautifully illustrated with scrawly ink blot style drawings from whimsily-named local artist Tweed Meyer, Ted Olinger has managed something rare and magical – to capture not only his own life in miniature, but that of the environment around him, in rich, deep language and poetic writing conjuring up the wilderness prose of Laurie Lee and Jon Krakauer – ten short stories like windows into Olinger’s life as he settles into Peninsula life with his young […]