Tag: Fiction

  • Short Story Review: “Wall Cano” by Souvankham Thammavongsa

    (The short story “Wall Cano” by Souvankham Thammavongsa appeared in the November 2nd, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Illustration by Lewis Chamberlain

    The first school science fair I participated in was six grade, and the kid that won the fair built a working model of a volcano. He had the whole baking soda and vinegar eruption that came overflowing out of the top of his mountain, which was so well done, we all assumed that his father had helped. To this day, when the words “science fair” are spoken, my memory goes back to that volcano, and the intertwined feeling of awe and disappointment. Memory is funny like that, because as an adult looking back, I can see now that I was lazy, and didn’t take the time on the project, and maybe the kid who won actually earned the top prize. Souvankham Thammavongsa’s “Wall Cano” is a story that also has a volcano from a science fair in it, but uses this prop in a very ingenious way, which addresses memory, childhood, and parenting.

    The story is about more than a science fair, or even a volcano. Even though the protagonist is remembering her childhood, its presented not as the past in retrospect, but more like a living memory. Tangents and incidents are remembered, not so much as to move the plot forward, more to decorate and color this world that the story takes place in. Not everything is explained, nor is every motivation understood, because this world is remembered from a ten-year old’s perspective. This creates a feeling of innocence in the story; a touch of curious wonder, but not confusion. The protagonist and the younger brother work to understand their world, as their parents aren’t guiding them. This is not due to neglect, but being that the parents are immigrants, the father refers to himself as a refugee, so they aren’t accustomed to how some thing work. And by proxy, neither do the children.

    I’m leaving out details of the story on purpose. A little bit because I don’t want to spoil it, but also because what is revealed, and how it is revealed, is an important part of this narrative. What seems random in fact is building the protagonist’s budding cognoscente reality. She might not understand how these things are connected, but she knows they are connected, yet we can see that they are connected. I loved that Thammavongsa trusted us, the reader, that we’d put it all together for the narrative to work, but still left it vague enough so there was a feeling of mystery.

    The final section of the story wraps everything up very well; asking how memories stay with us, continue to live in our consciousness, and influence us. And also, leading us to wonder how things would have been different if there was just the slightest bit of change, or even guidance.

  • 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.