I'm a writer and book lover interested in pretty much all aspects of literary fiction. My passion is short stories, and my reviews of new collections can be found here. After studying magazine journalism and French at Syracuse University, I now work as a tutor and freelance French-to-English literary translator.
@MaggieCregan_SU, [email protected]
Among My Favorite Short Story Collections of 2016 Callan Wink, the fishing-guide-turned-literary-breakout from the University of Wyoming's MFA program, mixes bluntness and poetry with a skill like few others. His stories take place in and around Montana, the twenty-first-century Wild West. Tightly focused, they tend to follow a single days- or hours-long plot from which larger backdrops unfurl.
These short stories are a worthwhile read-- if often smarter than they need to be. Released this February to New York Times and New Yorker acclaim, Greg Jackson's debut "Prodigals" layers introspection with millennial angst and still manages to be quite good.
An Engaging Read that Lives Up to the Hype The title references a "nest egg" (really a two million dollar trust fund meant to be split among four adult siblings) that vanishes in the first chapter after an instance of the charismatic oldest brother's recklessness.
Fans of short story master Rick Bass have 480 pages of lean prose and searing natural descriptions waiting for them in "For a Little While: New and selected stories," published this January. The first three-quarters of the book span Bass's writing career, while the last seven stories are new to this collection.
Amber Sparks' "The Unfinished World" maintains her reputation as a writer of the poetically strange and strangely poetic. This is her second book of short stories, after 2012's "May We Shed These Human Bodies" and 2013's "Desert Places," a haunting creation (and destruction) myth co-written with Robert Kloss.