Tag: Fiction

  • Short Story Review: “Appeasement, Ohio” by George Saunders

    (The short story “Appeasement, Ohio” by George Saunders appeared in the October 26th, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Photograph by James L. Amos / Getty

    How hard should a writer make a reader work? That was the question I kept asking myself as I read George Saunders’ “Appeasement, Ohio” which is a quirky little story. I’m not saying that getting though it was like reading Joyce’s Ulysses, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being asked to work at reading this story.

    How to describe the it? Lots of moving parts; family, cousins, kids, falling outs, reconnection, loyalty, obligations, conspiracies, tough love, and history. There is no secret, or big reveal in this story, but getting into the details of how this piece unfolds feels like I would be killing some of the fun of reading it in the first place. I will say this, the story did feel like it was inorganically structured to have three storylines that were supposed to weave together – or possibly not – but either way it stuck out as being manufactured rather than authentically blending into the narrative.

    What I wrestled with in “Appeasement, Ohio” was the style that the story was written in. Ultimately, Saunders’ writing style did complement the narrative. With the characters fragmented lives, a wildly unbelievable conspiracy theory, a surreal riot, and the loss of vision, nothing seemed on solid ground here. So, when the writing is chunky, choppy, even repetitive at times, it creates a feeling of disjointed incongruent tangents not fully lining up. This caused me, more than once, to have to go back and reread a section, to verify that I read what I read. For what this story was trying to express, it all successfully came together.

    But it was a bit of work to get there.

  • Short Story Review: “Chuck Murphy’s Last Run” by Kevin Barry

    (The short story “Chuck Murphy’s Last Run” by Kevin Barry appeared in the October 19th, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.)

    (Illustration by Thomas Colligan; Source photograph from Getty)

    Just about nobody likes getting older. The exception in my life is my kid, who looks forward to every birthday, with the adding another digit to her age. For the rest of us, at some point a switch is flipped, and getting older is something that is dreaded rather than celebrated. Kevin Barry’s story “Chuck Murphy’s Last Run” takes a stab at this predicament, using a group of aging Irish friends, who all belong in a quasi-biker gang, as they journey to send off their mutual friend who recently died.

    The story begins with a solid first paragraph, establishing that what will follow will be humorous as it tackles a somber situation. This approach worked well for the story, which was a very competent piece of writing. Nothing got too serious, as Barry would slip in a joke or two to break any building tension. Motivations were understood, and the interplay between characters felt honest. In all, the story moved at solid clip.

    Yet, nothing happened in this story that wasn’t predictable. You knew they were going to make it to their destination, you knew they were going to say goodbye to their friend, you knew people in the group were going to have an argument, and you knew the main character was going to learn that life was changing, again. This is the reason why I used the word competent to describe this story, because that’s what it was. I could diagram out this story, it was so well constructed. I wouldn’t call it paint by numbers, but it might be two steps away from that.

    What “Chuck Murphy’s Last Run” felt like was a piece of store-bought cake. Sometimes you just want a spongy, sweet piece of cake that hits the spot. It’s a good piece of cake, but five minutes later, you’ve already forgotten about it.

  • Personal Review: “Jesus’ Son” by Denis Johnson

    Up until a couple of months ago, I hadn’t ever heard of Denis Johnson. (And yes, the rock I live under is very comfortable.) I found out about him from a review of Ted Geltner’s biography of Johnson, Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures. From that article, I was intrigued and put Johnson’s Jesus’ Son on my reading list.

    If I had pushed myself, I could have read the book in a day, but spreading it out over three seemed more appropriate. A couple of things jumped out at me, besides the fact that it was a quick read. First, this book of short stories just oozed 90’s literature, which is strange as most of the stories take place in the 70’s, while the stories themselves were written in the 80’s, and only published in 1992. I can’t fully say why it felt so 90’s, but it Gen-X despondent seemed to be lurking in corners. The second idea the book presented to me is that the drunk/addict poet or writer is rather cliché now. Maybe not as drunken muscled as Hemmingway, Kerouac, or Burkowski, but the stories in the volume ran in the same vein. Here, we are presented with pretty much the same first-person character from story to story, who is too poetic to be a regular run of the mill drunk. No, this is the tragic drunk writer whose writing is their only salvation – the thing that keeps them going.

    That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy the book. No, I was struck at how simple, and effortless everything in the stories felt. It carried such weight but drifted on the air. The destruction of a character’s life never felt so beautiful and fragile. No, I get why Jesus’ Son is placed on best of short story collection lists, year after year. Johnson’s stories and writing style has clearly been influential. I was about half way through “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” when it dawned on me how many flash writers must consider Denis Johnson a primary source, with his books lovingly squirreled away on their shelves.

    The final thought that I had while reading this book was that these stories felt like they were fun to write. Some books can feel laborious – not to read that is – such as writing it took time, work, dedication, perseverance to deliver the story exactly the way the writer wanted to tell it. Jesus’ Son felt like it was a blast to write. Either making it all up, or using real life situations, or maybe combining it all together, the end result was a book that felt like it was just as entertaining to write as it was to read.

    Having said all of this, I must now return to my home under the rock. There, I will toss this book up on the shelf, with all the other collections of short stories that I own and wonder how did I miss out on Denis Johnson when he was alive?

  • Short Story Review: “Stories” by Annie Ernaux

    (The short story “Stories” by Annie Ernaux, which was translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer, appeared in the June 8th, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Photograph by Jet Swan for The New Yorker

    You know what I like most about Annie Ernaux’s “Stories”? Well, besides the language, and tone, and ethereal feeling of the loss of a past childhood, or how it feels innocent and menacing at the same time, or the power of words and storytelling, or how the protagonist/narrator doesn’t seem to be a very nice person because she sort of traumatizes a five-year-old. No, my appreciation for this story began to form when I finished reading it, as I was left wondering how fictional was this piece? I know full well that the overwhelming majority of Ernaux’s work is autobiographical, but I was still left wondering, to what degree is this fictional, or factual? For the sake of writing this, I’m going to come down on the side of fiction, as it is in the “Fiction” issue of The New Yorker, but I feel that for this story to work on all levels, Ernaux needs us the believe that this really happened. And not a portion of it; all of it. Even though I am sure this story is based on an event which has been fictionalized.

    See, it’s that last paragraph which might well be the best, and correctly used version of the “Dead chick in the basket” trick. (To explain, “Dead Chick in the Basket” refers to a writing device where the final paragraph of a short story contains new information about a character which is meant to make the reader view the actions, statements, or feelings of that character in a different light. This device was effectively used in J.D. Salinger’s short story “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” where the name of the device comes from.) We go through this whole story, and then are given this last paragraph which seems to explain that this is all real. Or is it? She is a character in her own story? She wrote this to understand herself, but ended up writing another story? (You know, this just might be an unreliable narrator.)

    I will die on this hill of a fictional interpretation, because wasn’t Ernaux trying to tell us in this story that she discovered she had the ability to create a fiction so powerful that the audience accepted it as reality and had an honest emotional reaction to it? It’s like it’s meta on meta on meta. And we will never figure out what the truth is because only Ernaux knows that.

  • Short Story Review: “The Dreamdrive” by Weike Wang

    (The short story “The Dreamdrive” by Weike Wang appeared in the May 25th, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Illustration by Chris Harnan

    Reading “The Dreamdrive” was like watching my favorite basketball player miss an unobstructed layup.

    First, there was the tone of the piece, which was attempting to be lighter, easy, and humorous. The effect of this was that the story never achieved a depth. Everything was presented at arm’s length, making the story feel like nothing was at risk, or truly important. Also, in an attempt at humor, one character was described as “his then girlfriend,” implying her eventual fate. This cliched trick of description can work if it is partnered with irony, but in this setting, the attempt was to humorously build sympathy for our sad sack of a protagonist. Unfortunately, I did not see the reason why we needed to have this information presented in such a manner.

    Second, the revelation of the dream fell out of the sky and crashed like dishes on the floor. It was as if the narrator decided that the story needed to end now, and we were quickly given the relevance of what had been happening. But without any foreshadowing, or even a climatic build up, the revelation doesn’t achieve any resonance. Such as, now that the protagonist understands where his reoccurring dream is coming from, how does that help him move forward? It’s implied that he can sleep again, but is there nothing deeper here? How is the hero changed, other than being able to sleep? It felt to me that an emotional plot point was missing.

    Third, with the tone and lack of resonance in this story, it made the narrator sound condescending to the protagonist. The narrator treats the protagonist as a person to ridicule and kick around. Multiple times the hero is shown as a person no one takes seriously. And honestly, if the narrator doesn’t care about the protagonist, then why should the reader?