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 | From Erik Wander, your About Books & Literature Editor This week, we're welcoming a new member to the small collection of About.com sites devoted exclusively to books and literature: Short Stories, with new content including a piece on flash fiction and one detailing how to write short stories with strong characters, among others. We're therefore dedicating this week's edition to a genre that the likes of Alice Munro, Raymond Carver and Flannery O'Connor, to name just a few, have made look easy at times, but that so many novelists, poets, essayists, journalists and writers primarily of other genres have learned, many the hard way, is anything but. | |
Stories: 'A & P' by John Updike
"Summer is the season of skin, but how much is too much?" writes our new Short Stories guide about this Updike piece in which three teen girls march into a grocery store clad only in bathing suits, thus unwittingly testing the limits of what's socially acceptable. Find out how such a simple yet shocking act in many ways affects Sammy, a cashier at the store and the narrator of the story, and how Updike takes aim at our own consumer-conditioned society.
| The Esquire Four: New Voices for a New Era of Fiction
Short stories by four up-and-comers are featured in this e-book published by Esquire Magazine and digital publisher Byliner: "Hesca" by M.C. Armstrong, "Retreat from Moscow" by Jennifer duBois, "Rape in the Animal Kingdom" by Matt Sumell and "You Only Get Letters from Jail" by Jodi Angel. And if you're really looking for something short to read, this collection includes a bonus: the winner and finalists in Esquire's most recent short short fiction contest.
| Classics: 'The Story of an Hour'
The title of this 1894 story by Kate Chopin refers to the time immediately after protagonist Louise Mallard learns that her husband has apparently died in a railroad accident. Far from being devastated or shocked by the news as her sister fears, especially considering her heart problems, Mallard instead feels liberated, something that made Chopin somewhat of a controversial writer by 1890s standards. Chopin, however, has something even more shocking in store for her main character and the reader.
| Collections: 'Dubliners'
Fifteen stories about middle class life near Dublin just after the turn of the 20th century comprise this collection by James Joyce published in 1914. Irish nationalism, identity and often conflicting influences are themes that recur in the stories themselves, which are narrated by increasingly older protagonists, from children to adolescents to older adults as the stories progress, and hinge on moments when the characters experience epiphanies of various kinds.
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