Short Stories Book Reviews

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 […]

This small collection consists of six very short stories and a novella. The stories are linked by theme: death, madness, forgiveness, love. It’s primal stuff, and Donnelly handles his material gently, almost reverently. The first six stories are very short, very lean, almost ghost-like. And indeed the quiet dead figure largely in these stories, as do the unhappy and angry living. However, not much is resolved, or even really explored, in these first few stories. They are almost like snapshots or sketches of people trying unsuccessfully to reach out and connect with one another, whether across a table in a […]

Spoofs are a serious business in literature, particularly when murder is involved. Pulling off a send-up of hard-boiled detective and spy novels is like singing badly on purpose –  it ain’t as easy as it looks.

This volume of fifteen short stories, the third in a related series by Australian writer Gerry Burke, provides the reader with everything the crime spoof genre has to offer. Burke’s writing style is terse, the read is quick and no one is bothered by any pesky Oxford commas in these fifteen short stories.

Our narrator is Patrick Pesticide, aka Paddy Pest, a self-referenced ‘discount […]

Reviewing self-published fiction can sometimes feel like a thankless task, even when you’re being paid for it. You can find yourself slogging through a book so woeful that you wonder how the author could possibly think it was ready for publication. Other times, you’ll be excited by a premise or intrigued by a character, but ultimately disappointed because the book doesn’t quite reach its mark. Then, there are those rare occasions when you find yourself in the hands of an author so unarguably gifted that your critical faculties are temporarily cut off. Within pages, you’ve slipped into the experience that […]

Short stories seem to be on the upturn in self-publishing and I am beginning to warm to the genre when I get to read something as original as this collection, “Beauty And The Singularities” by John Waite.

So what are the singularities of beauty? The development of knowledge of some other kind of beauty, maybe, beauty in the soul or in a memory, or maybe how one small happening can relate to another quite by accident and yet cause an event that is very much on purpose. This is the theme here, and with eight stories that somehow feel connected […]