From One Book Lover

Nathan Englander 's new collection of short stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank , first entered my consciousness when I read the title story in The New Yorker. For days, I read parts of it aloud to anyone within earshot and vowed to read the book when it was published. I enjoyed the stories immensely and hope other readers will take up this tome as soon as they can. The title story involves two friends whose lives went separate ways and brings them back together to ask the question one of them has asked herself, and others, since childhood. Long-term friends whose relationship gelled during crazy, cattywhompus youth know each other best, this story reveals. The story weaves between the friends, the friends' husbands, the couples, never flinching, refusing to let go no matter how much it burns. Each of Englander's stories in this collection does that very thing: hang on for dear life until your time is up and the peep-show door closes. There ar...

Before I picked up Visitants , a collection of short stories that involve angels, I would have ventured to say that the heavenly host are there for humanity's well-being. Now... well, now I am not so sure. You may not like every story in this collection, but you will never think of the heavenly host the same, ever. I first became interested in this book because of Neil Gaiman: his is the first story in the collection. His tale, "Murder Mysteries," is personal and unreal at the same time, a character that makes the entire story immediate and plausible. I felt brave, so I soldiered on. From plagues to plays, from computers to curses, each author takes an interesting turn around the block with this subject. Each was interesting in its own right, and editor Stephen Jones arranges them in an interesting, attractive order. I have to admit, I was awash with a particular tide for a while, but as I read one or two stories a day, I wasn't too overwhelmed when a part...

I have become a fan of short-story collections.  I have enjoyed the works of John Connelly , not enjoyed the works of Kelly Link — then I encountered Tunneling to the Center of the Earth .  Please stop what you are doing (yes, reading this review) and go purchase a copy, read it and return to this review. See??????? Holy cow.  This begs not only the question of who thinks of this kind of stuff, but how can someone make the telling of it so right ? Like with other collections, the first story had a wow-factor of 11.  The idea of a "professional" grandparent is intriguing, and a business that would be really pretty win-win for all parties involved. If that's where Kevin Wilson left it, I'd be impressed.  No, it's where he goes with "Grand Stand-Ins" that haunts me now, weeks after my first encounter with it. And "The Shooting Man" may not have been a total surprise, but — again — it's where the story travels after it leaves my im...

I am all about weird. I seek out the weird. However, I think I hit my weird quota with the short story collection Stranger Things Happen . Kelly Link's collection of short stories goes to New York and beyond. What she does well is spin the yarn: I wasn't sure where the story was going, but I was game to follow Link's lead. At first. Then things got weird. When a story concluded, I honestly had no idea what it meant. I was lost. It had to mean more than just the words on the page, or it would have been a colossal waste of time. I was transfixed by the first story, "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose," where a man with major memory issues is writing a letter to his wife. As the story unfolded, I was transfixed. Many other storytellers tried to imagine this lost-feeling destination with limited success — but Link had a handle on it. Well, until the end approached, and while I saw where it was going, I didn't like it. She retold a couple of fairy ta...