Category
Short Story Month 2011
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05.04.11Sunshine Over HelsinkiNo one in Helsinki saw his weather reports. They didn't need his two-minute segment, twice a day, nestled between the football scores and children's cartoon based on the Finnish epic "Kalvala"; they could just look out their windows, stand on their stoops, and know to wear a coat today. The reports were for Finnish expatriates, nostalgic for Baltic winds and icy sidewalks, or for a handful of students learning the words "lumi" for "snow" and "pilvi" for "clouds." Sunshine Over Helsinki, published in Failbetter in 2004, is a more substantial story than After Ice Cream. It doesn't have much for plot; ...
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05.03.11Floating BridgeAccidentShe meant to go on and tell him what the doctor had said. At the outset, "Floating Bridge" seems like it's going to be a typical cancer battle story of the sort that seems almost required in a collection of contemporary stories. Jinny has just left an appointment with her oncologist, and has been collected by her husband who is setting up a sickroom--"temporarily, though nobody said so"--in their house. I thought I knew what to expect: the strained relationships, the avoidance of the unavoidable topic of death, the brave struggle. Better written than usual, because written by Alice Munro, but ...
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05.02.11After Ice CreamThey had decided to jump with an air of sudden jocularity. All week they had commiserated over the hundred little tragedies that stained their lives: He complained that the Peterson account went to Bixby because Bixby had married a partner’s ugly daughter; she countered that the price of nylons at Schuneman’s had gone beyond the reach of her secretary salary; he told her that he suspected his wife was fooling around with the milkman; she had caught her fiance in bed with a streetcar conductor named Bud; he had wasted his youth, and looked forward with dread to the long ...
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05.01.11Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, MarriageDeception It had all begun with Sabitha saying, on the way to school, "We have to go by the Post Office. I have to send a letter to my dad." There are a lot of things to note about "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage," the title story of Alice Munro's tenth collection: her handing of perspective, the way she sketches just enough setting to bring post-war Saskatchewan to life, how she illuminates a character through their reflections on other characters. But what makes it most interesting from a writer's perspective is how she builds the story around a deception that is never ...
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04.26.11Collection Giveaway Project for Short Story MonthMay is short story month, and it's going to be a busy time here. For starters, the Fiction Writers Review has launched a Fiction Giveaway Project to help litbloggers promote the short story; I'm going to participate by giving away a copy of Alice Munro's Too Much Happiness, one of the best collections I've read recently (giveaway details below). I'll also be posting daily about a story, alternating between one of my own and one from someplace else (a collection, a magazine or journal, an on-line publication, etc.). The first stories that I'll be covering are from another Alice Munro collection, ...
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