беременность и диета

BEFORE THE END, AFTER THE BEGINNING by Dagoberto Gilb

Dagoberto Gilb’s latest book, BEFORE THE END, AFTER THE BEGINNING, although a slight collection, is loaded with insight and humor. It’s a book about identity, about the tension between limiting factors outside our control– our race, our class, our gender – and our complexity as individuals.

November 9, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  · Posted in: Award Winning Author, Class - Race - Gender, Humorous, Identity, Latin American, Mexico, Short Stories, Texas

THE OUTLAW ALBUM by Daniel Woodrell

Daniel Woodrell is widely known for the movie adaptation of his novel, Winter’s Bone, which won the Sundance Film Festival’s Best Picture Prize in 2010. He has just published his first book of short stories, THE OUTLAW ALBUM, a collection of twelve dark and riveting stories.

November 1, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  · Posted in: Short Stories, US South

BLUEPRINTS FOR BUILDING BETTER GIRLS by Elissa Schappell

Poor Holden Caulfield. In Catcher in the Rye, he muses, “Girls. You never know what they’re going to think.” How right he was! In Elissa Schappell’s new short story collection, the old blueprints for Appropriate Female Behavior — the name of a vintage etiquette manual, 1963 edition — have all been tossed away. And now the girls and women are forced to muddle through with the new rules: Be yourself but also be what your boyfriend, parents, and girlfriends want you to be as well.

October 11, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , ,  · Posted in: Humorous, Short Stories

THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2011 edited by Geraldine Brooks

This year’s editor of THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2011 is Geraldine Brooks, an accomplished journalist and fiction writer. She says of her selections “that the easiest and the first choices were the stories to which I had a physical response.” I would agree that the best stories in this collection are those that are most visceral and physical in nature. Ms. Brooks also states that “In the end, the stories I fell upon with perhaps the greatest delight were the outliers, the handful or so that defied the overwhelming gravitational pull toward small-canvas contemporary realism.”

October 5, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , , , , ,  · Posted in: Short Stories

THE SURF GURU by Doug Dorst

THE SURF GURU reads like a challenge to all that is conventional. Just when the reader begins to see a link, one story to the next–all these characters seem marginal, for instance–along comes the atypical character profile and out goes the convention of form.

September 23, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  · Posted in: Short Stories

ADIOS, HAPPY HOMELAND by Ana Menendez

I have seldom read such an extraordinary collection of stories, fascinating in their sheer inventiveness, subtly interlinked so that their images reflect and coruscate. It is not entirely right to speak of stories either. Roughly half the two dozen pieces in this collection might be called stories in the normal sense, though some are no more than brief surreal hallucinations. The rest include several poems, two sets of dictionary entries, a letter and the reply to it, a news report, and a brief history of poetry in Cuba. All the pieces are ostensibly by different authors, collected by an expatriate Irishman who introduces himself in the preface and concludes with brief biographies of all the writers involved. All of course are fictional, even the author herself: “Ana Menéndez is the pseudonym of an imaginary writer and translator, invented, if not to lend coherence to this collection, at least to offer it the pretense of contemporary relevance.”

August 18, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , ,  · Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Cuba, Short Stories, Unique Narrative, World Literature