“Agreeable” by Jonathan Franzen (May 31, 2010)
Read the story here: [Link]
Franzen is an American novelist who won the National Book Award for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for “The Corrections”.
Category: Misc
“Ash” by Roddy Doyle (May 24, 2010)
The author is an Irish novelist, dramatist and screenwriter. Several of his books have been made into successful films, beginning with The Commitments in 1991. He won the Booker Prize in 1993. [Source: Wikipedia]
Read “Ash”: [Link]
Bonus short story “Sleep” in London Times: [Link]
“Free Fruits For Young Widows” by Nathan Englander (May 17, 2010)
A short story about an Israeli man who explains to his son why he gives an old war comrade who once beat him badly free produce everyday. Read the story here: [Link]
Nathan Englander is a Jewish-American author born in Long Island, NY in 1970. He wrote the short story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1999. The volume won widespread critical acclaim, earning Englander the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Malamud Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kauffman Prize.
“Uncle Rock” by Dagoberto Gilb [Link]
The author is an American writer born in Los Angeles, California, whose reputation, after years between L.A. and Texas, is as one of the leading voices from the American Southwest. His first full book of stories was The Magic of Blood (1993), with the University of New Mexico Press. The stories are populated by working men, Mexican American, who live in the Southwest. It won the 1994 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award, the Jesse Jones Texas Institute of Letters Award, and was a PEN Faulkner finalist. [Source: Wikipedia]
“La Vita Nuova” by Allegra Goodman (5/3/2010)
Read the short story here: [Link]
About the author: Allegra Goodman is an American author from Cambridge, MA. Her novels include The Family Markowitz (1996), Kaaterskill Falls (1998), Paradise Park (2001), Intuition (2006), and her latest The Other Side of the Island (2008).
“Edgemont Drive” by E.L. Doctorow
The author on the inspiration for Edgemont Drive: “I found myself thinking how difficult it is to leave a house you have lived in for a long time. In some sense you never leave it. People bond with their homes, it is a very serious attachment, a kind of distributed consciousness.”
On the title of the story: “My muse came up with it. The story is set in a house but the strange car parked in front of a house figures in it as well. And so Edgemont Drive, suggesting an address, and perhaps the cool regard of the story teller. There are Edgemont Drives everywhere, in every state. You can Google them.”
On why the story is told entirely through dialogue: “The first line I wrote was a question. A man questioning his wife. She had to answer and so the story broke out that way. I was getting everything I needed from what was being said. From the voices. The economy pleased me.”
“Prefiguration of Lalo Cura” by Roberto Bolano
The story backgrounds Olegario Cura Exposito, a character from 2666 - [Link]
“The TV” by Ben Loory
A short story about a man who watches himself on television.
Read the full story here: [Link]
Ben Loory’s book “Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day” is still seeking a publisher.
“Gavin Highly” by Janet Frame
A short story about a hermit who tries to sell his book collection.
Read the full story here: [Link]
Janet Frame is a novelist/essayist/poet from New Zealand who passed away in 2004. She received the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for The Carpathians, the last novel published during her lifetime. Her 1963 novel Towards Another Summer was just released in the US.
“Just Before the Black” by author/actor James Franco
A story about how it’s only right before you die that you know you’re living
Read the full story: [Link]
