If you haven't read "Starve a Rat" by Justin Torres, please do; it's wonderful. Published in the October 2011 issue of Harper's, "Starve a Rat" deftly uses first-person point of…
Published in the July 2011 issue of Harper's, "Incident in the Oriente" by Paul Theroux reads like a 19th century adventure story steeped in imperialism and the power of one man's will…
Bonnie Nadzam's short story "The Losing End" published in the August 2011 issue of Harper's is a glimpse of a man in a moment. Time is sliced to a span…
There has been an ongoing conversation for years regarding aging, healthcare, and the end of life. Films like The Savages explore those topics with a mix of humor and sadness. "The…
As I've mentioned earlier in posts regarding Alice Munro's stories, she is a master at creating complex narratives which span time. "Pride" published in the April 2011 issue of Harper's…
The article/conversation "Can Madison Avenue make us love our government?" published in the February 2011 issue of Harpers is a thought provoking dialogue about advertising and the image of the…
"Always Raining Somewhere, Said Jim Johnson" by John Edgar Wideman is a story that revisits a writer's experience at the Iowa Writing Workshop. Fiction? Nonfiction? It doesn't matter. While Wideman…
What I appreciate about Don DeLillo's story "Hammer and Sickle" is the immediacy of it. The character, Jerold Bradway, is in a minimum security prison for white-collar criminals after being…
John Berger's story, "A Brush" is about an encounter the narrator has with a Cambodian couple while swimming at a municipal pool in Paris. The story has a faltering beginning…
Last month, I wrote about "Uncle Rock" by Dagoberto Gilb and complained that there was no impact. It read like a coming of age story that lost me. In "Please,…