A haphazard and unpolished set of tales despite occasional Southern charms.
A collection of short stories that aims to inject real-world drama into tales of the holiday season.
Editor Davis takes up the laudable challenge of shedding light on rural poverty in an often saccharine genre. A recently released prisoner struggles to buy gifts for his daughters in Laura Hunter’s “As Luck Would Have It,” a notable work that encapsulates a bleak realism one doesn’t often encounter in stereotypical depictions of Christmas. In it, the ex-con gets out of prison only to encounter a post–Covid-19 world of social distancing in which the cost of protective masks is prohibitive and conservative members of his family fail to grasp the pandemic’s reality. However, other entries in this anthology fail to reach similar heights. Many unfold too quickly, offering sketchy narratives that feel wan and lifeless. Others simply feel inconsequential; in one story, for instance, a narrator merely glowers at rotten kids in a mall, while in another, a narrator unremarkably ruminates on his dad while peeling an orange. A few clichéd, hopeful endings lack any grit to speak of, and a few tales take place outside the Southern United States despite the book’s title: Pete Black’s “Stille Nact,” with its bland report of a World War I truce, is the most obvious example. In addition, “Moonlight” features a distracting use of Southern dialect that feels mocking and garish. Ultimately, although a few stories stand out as rare treats—including Jennifer Horne’s wryly narrated “Halfway to Nashville,” which closes the collection—this book too often feels as if one is rummaging through a stocking full of coal.
A haphazard and unpolished set of tales despite occasional Southern charms.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 75
Publisher: BWPublications
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The spirit of grace under pressure and creativity under fire animates a wonderfully diverse set of stories.
Ng selects 20 stories that illustrate why we might still read fiction in a time of disinformation and lies.
As the trials and tribulations of the 21st century have unfolded, the Best American Short Stories anthology has become a particular way of taking the temperature of each passing year. As Ng writes in her introduction to the latest group, “Short stories in particular can act like little tuning forks, helping us to clarify our own values—then allowing us to bring ourselves into alignment with what we believe. In a time when our values are being tested daily, it’s hard to think of anything more important.” Many of them are also fun to read, a quality appreciated more than ever by depressed and overwhelmed readers. The stories are ordered alphabetically, a structure maintained in the following selection, which is unfortunately limited by space. “Take Me to Kirkland,” by Sarah Anderson, is very funny, a little weird, and certainly one of Costco’s finest hours. “What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?” by Emma Binder is a cinematic mini-thriller about a trans kid visiting his hometown, terrified of being “clocked” by the people he grew up with after he saves a local from drowning. “Time of the Preacher,” by Bret Anthony Johnston, is one of several pandemic stories—in it, a snake, which may or may not be under the refrigerator, inspires a quarantine-breaking cry for help from a fence-builder’s ex-wife. Another story of that time, “Yellow Tulips,” by Nathan Curtis Roberts, also combines endearing, funny first-person narration with a more serious theme. A Mormon man in an uptight Utah suburb has to manage his developmentally disabled adult son through the complexities of quarantine. One day, he discovers that his son has “gotten into the provisions Mormons are all but commanded to keep, eating Nutella and Marshmallow Fluff from their jars.…Brig, we put these things aside for the apocalypse,’” the father says, while his son “grinned gleefully, sugary goo smeared across his lips and fingers. ‘It’s an apocalypse now!’”
The spirit of grace under pressure and creativity under fire animates a wonderfully diverse set of stories.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780063399808
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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