Category: Short stories

October 7, 2023

How to Make a Slave by Jerald Walker **** (of 4)

Jerald Walker is a Black professor at a prestigious Boston college. He lives in an overwhelmingly upscale Boston-adjacent community, and on the surface would appear to have put considerable distance between his childhood days in the ghettos of Chicago and the present day. Yet, as he chronicles his daily experience as the one person who […]

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July 12, 2022

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw *** (of 4)

A series of loosely connected short stories about the inner thoughts and external actions of younger Black women whose wants and desires are not so...

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October 20, 2016

Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting by Ian Frazier *** (of 4)

Many of the essays, interviews, and reports collected here were first published in the New Yorker, but not one of them is less interesting reading a...

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July 13, 2016

What we Talk about when we Talk about Anne Frank *** (of 4) by Nathan Englander

Eight short stories. All of them sad. Englander pitches his stories to test the limits of love in binding marriages, ageless friendships, families, and neighbors. Two...

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April 8, 2016

Redeployment by Phil Klay *** (of 4)

Phil Klay’s short stories about Marine Corps life in Iraq and after Iraq begin so realistically that I had to check to confirm I was...

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November 26, 2014

The UnAmericans by Molly Antopol **** (of 4)

Eight short stories about young and old Jews in America and in Israel and every character elicits your sympathy. Antopol starts her stories in the...

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May 9, 2014

You Can Date Boys When You’re Forty by Dave Barry *** (of 4)

A series of slightly augmented columns from Barry’s newspaper gig smashed together in a very funny book. Barry muses on grammar, sex, grammar and sex,...

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January 4, 2014

This is the Story of a Happy Marriage ** (of 4) by Ann Patchett

This is a collection of Patchett’s non-fiction essays, all previously published. Well-written, autobiographical, unresearched, and self-aggrandizing. Patchett is not only a strong writer, but she...

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June 22, 2010

Old Men at Midnight by Chaim Potok *** (of 4)

Enigmatic. I went back and forth between thinking the three short stories were too simple, too typical, not completely unique recountings of Jewish suffering in...

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June 22, 2010

Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmozgis **** (of 4)

This short collection of short stories is a wonderful piece of honey cake with a glass of tea. A Jewish Russian immigrant to Toronto describes...

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