The Book of Right and Wrong, by Matt Debenham

May 17, 2010 by ninams

The stories in Matt Debenham’s debut collection, The Book of Right and Wrong, are quietly and beautifully brilliant.  Debenham presents luminescent briefings of specific turning points in lives.  Both the lives and the turning points are so real and so engaging that my own life felt transformed — illuminated — by the changes wrought in [...]

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Burning Bright and Beautiful

March 19, 2010 by ninams

Ron Rash is a writer of quiet and stunning beauty. His novel One Foot in Eden was one of my favorites in my year of reading one book a day. When I received his latest publication, a collection of short stories entitled Burning Bright, I was excited to sit down and delve in. I was not disappointed. [...]

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Glowing Observations of Moments in Life

February 23, 2010 by ninams

Tara Masih’s debut collection of short stories, Where the Dog Star Never Glows, displays her great talent at observation and description, as well as her bravery in tackling places and periods outside of her own experience. She moves her stories with confidence and faith through locales as different as a beach village in Puerto Rico, a [...]

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Forgetting English, by Midge Raymond

November 20, 2009 by ninams

Forgetting English, short stories by Midge Raymond, are unsettling and tightly-recorded revelations about relationships, exploring and dissecting the connections between siblings, spouses, and friends. Perhaps the most disturbing relationship Raymond probes, then reveals, is the link within: the relationship each person has with their internal selves.  We are multiples: who we were as a child, [...]

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Beautiful Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro

November 5, 2009 by ninams

The five stories of “Music and Nightfall” contained in Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro display Ishiguro’s virtuosity in creating fiction that is both illuminating and pleasurable. Reading his works is always an experience of multiple satisfactions — characters, landscape, plot — and the themes he explores are consistently brought to a new place of examination and [...]

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Greedy For More Than Candy

November 1, 2009 by ninams

To prepare for Halloween, every year I read Halloween books.  When my kids were little, I stuck to children’s books and we read them over and over in the weeks preceding October 31st.  On the first day of October, my kids still ask to get the Halloween books (and decorations) down from the attic and [...]

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Book A Room

October 20, 2009 by ninams

The short stories contained in Laura Chester’s Rancho Weirdo are wonderfully weird, original, and fresh.  They are also as sharp as broken glass, with its jagged pieces sending off flashes of light that beam understanding, sympathy and grace.  I laughed out loud during the first stories and by the final installments, with the mood moving steadily [...]

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Through the Eyes of Children

October 13, 2009 by ninams

Yesterday I read the short stories of Uwen Akpan collected in Say You’re One of Them.  I chose the book this summer on a visit to the local bookstore.  I was intrigued by the cover photo of a young girl in a lovely white dress running away, down a sandy dirt path lined with African trees [...]

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Noir from Akashic Books: Willing to Travel the Globe

October 8, 2009 by ninams

What is so interesting and compelling about the noir genre, when it is well-executed, is the paradox — and essential truth — that it portrays: that even in the darkest of human endeavors, there is a belief, false or not, that good is being done.  Badly-executed noir is just pulp fiction, the depiction of violence [...]

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Truth Around Your Life

October 3, 2009 by ninams

There are many beautifully-wrought stories in the collection The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and every one of them rings with truth. Most of the stories left me wanting more, hoping for novels rising from the bones of the story, and answers to “what happens next?” Adichie is very good at creating quickly [...]

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