Short Stories

The short story is the only form judged by what it leaves out. Carver cut until the silence did the talking; Cathedral is in this wing and its last page will follow you around. Borges built infinite libraries in eight pages. Chekhov ruined every writer who came after him by making it look effortless. People treat this shelf as a warm-up for novels; they have it backwards. A novel forgives a slow chapter. A story dies of one weak sentence. Read one a night, no more. They are built for the space between days, and the good ones expand there like something dropped in water.

Same ashtray, same gin, same dying marriage, twelve times over; Carver's furniture barely changes between stories, and once you notice the late-period warmth arriving on schedule (the blind man, the baker, the peacock) the epiphanies start to feel administered rather than earned. A Small, Good Thing leans on a dead child harder than its restraint pretends.

— against Cathedral

Saunders writes every consciousness in the same damaged vernacular: the Spiderhead prisoner, the Semplica-Girl dad, the lovestruck teens of "Victory Lap," all thinking in exclamation-pointed corporate patois. The machinery of uplift is visible too; stories bend toward a redemptive swerve you can set your watch by. He is the kindest satirist alive, and kindness, administered this reliably, starts to feel like a product feature.

— against Tenth of December

Cold to the touch: Borges builds infinite libraries and immortal cities but almost never a person to care about, and a dozen variations on mirror, maze, and encyclopedia begin to rhyme. This particular volume is also a patchwork of translators at different temperatures, assembled by his American editors rather than by him. The ideas are eternal; the company is chilly.

— against Labyrinths