Tag: Short Story Review

  • Short Story Review: “Safety” by Joan Silber

    (The short story “Safety” by Joan Silber appeared in the December 8th, 2025 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Illustration by Chris W. Kim

    You know, every “time” is a “historic time” but some are more historic than others. I will agree that we are in the middle of one of those historic times, and if I am lucky enough to have grandkids, then I imagine they will ask me “WTF was everyone thinking, grandpa?” The good news is that over the past three or four months, I have started to see works of art in different media start to tackle the events of deportation, disappearing, and what effect these policies will have on America. I am going to throw Joan Silber’s “Safety” in with all of these works, though uneven, I applaud what this story attempted.

    Overly Simplified Synopsis: Two girls become friends growing up in New York, one Muslim the other Jewish, and both decedents of people who immigrated to the US to escape dictators. They go their separate ways in life and reconnect in New York, where the Muslim friend now has a child and a partner who is a comedian. When the comedian is on his way home from a gig, he is disappeared by the Administration.

    There is an ease to this story, and a simple directness to the writing. What it does well is create a picture of the modern melting pot that America is – people of different backgrounds are still coming here, and their children are still connecting with people that are different from them, and finding a commonality in our shared humanity. Silber does well in creating a context for the Muslim family regarding escaping the Nazis, being forced to migrate by Stalin to Uzbekistan, and the trauma of family separation.

    Yet, through it all, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this story was pulling its punches. There is a huge amount of drama here that is being sieved through a philosophical existential filter, but it never seems to amount to an emotional climax. For example, think of how these families lives’ have been influenced by authoritarians – from being pushed out of home nations, to being pushed together in America – and how these families have made new lives for themselves. And when a new Authoritarian pressure is applied, the characters seem more resigned, as if ordained to this fate, rather than free to exist.

    Ultimately, I appreciated this story, and Silber, for taking a swing at an issue that needs to be swung at. “Safety” uncomfortably reminds us that history does repeat itself. That immigration, deportation, and citizenship (both in its legal and the social definition) needs to be discussed and debated again, so we can finally find a way to break this awful cycle.

  • Short Story Review: “Mother of Men” by Lauren Groff

    (The short story “Mother of Men” by Lauren Groff appeared in the November 10th, 2025 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Photograph by Bryan Schutmaat

    “Mother of Men” by Lauren Groff is a good story, except for one thing. And I’ll get to that.

    But before I get to that, this story made me think about the world my mother lived in. She was married with three sons, and though she told us she loved it, she did have to deal with three stinky boys, who became men, and all the baggage that came with it. Later in life, when me and my brothers got married and had our own families, did it start to dawn on us how much of her life was confined with masculine demands. In that context, much of what is expressed in this story by the narrator rang true to me; that men are always in her house, how her boys were now men, and the need for her home to be a safe place.

    When the stalker is added to the story, and thus kicking off the plot, the menace that this man places on the narrator, is not only an immediate threat to her, but also to her home, and these men in her life. And this stalker is truly a threat, because he does have a gun. This weapon also functions as a reminder that violence and men are never too far apart from each other. Her husband has a baseball bat, her sons offer their own cocky protection to their mother, and the narrator even tries to enlist the workers from her home renovation for additional security. All of this raised interesting questions of violence and safety, of masculine and feminine roles, how a mother goes from protector of her sons, to needing protection from them. Even the title of story, which is also the title Catholics use in reference to Mary mother of Jesus, wasn’t lost on me, and added another layer to the piece. Great stuff.

    And then the climax happened. The stalker enters the home at night, the narrator is unable to take action, so her son asks the stalker to leave, which the stalker does. And it felt completely incongruent to everything that had come before in the story. This climax broke Chekhov’s Gun Rule, which means if you introduce a gun in the story, you have to fire it at the end. There was an expectation of violence, threat, even menace in this story, and to not deliver a resolution to that expectation left the ending of the story feeling hollow. And I did spend time thinking about this climax and the choices that were made, but I kept coming back to the same conclusion – the gun needed to be fired.

  • Prose Poetry Review: “Guns, Sex, Phones” by Katherine Schmidt

    (The prose poetry piece “Guns, Sex, Phones” by Katherine Schmidt appeared at Rejection Letters on October 16, 2025.)

    Image by Aaron Burch

    It’s been awhile since a work popped me on the nose, making me wake up and pay attention. “Guns, Sex, Phones” by Katherine Schmidt isn’t an angry or an aggressive poem, but it does confront the numb sedimentary routine that can creep in, and dominate one’s life.

    I was taken with the start of the piece; how the first line acted like an explosion, and then what followed were words that created contraction, as if the speaker was falling back into themselves, regressing. Look at that first line of the piece, “My friend says let’s go to the shooting range…” a statement to take action, but then the speaker pulls back, “and I tell her I don’t know anything about guns. About hunting. About how fun it is to let loose.” What follows are three examples of empty, disparate attempts at human connection; dinner with a phone, responding to a text on the toilet, not answering a call from their mother though the speaker watches the screen light up. It’s a good use of the “Rule of Three” and excellent at setting the theme and mood. When the choice is made to take action, to connect both physically and emotionally, an almost resignation takes over. The phone reenters the scene. Though the speaker makes a shallow attempt of connection with their friend via the phone, I can’t blame the friend for not watching the sent meme.

    This isn’t the first piece to decry the vapidness of smart phones, how they are destroying people’s ability to connect with others, or how technology can be alienating. What “Guns, Sex, Phones” touches on with a sharp melancholy focus is how lonely and emotionally trapped this world is becoming. There is no substitute for connection, actual human connection. That these connections need to be cultivated. And if we’re not careful with where we put our attention, we may lose the ability to grow further.

  • Short Story Review: “Door in the Woods” by Chris Scott

    (The flash fiction story “Door in the Woods” by Chris Scott was presented at Okay Donkey on October 3rd, 2025.)

    The “Door in the Woods” by Chris Scott pulls off my favorite story telling trick; It leaves me with more questions than answers, but not in the frustrating “jerk you around” kind’a way. This is a work that straddles realism and surrealism. It is relatable, authentic, but also funny and absurd. In little over 1,100 words, it is a very specific story addressing a rather universal experience most encounter in their relationships.

    The story starts off with a bit of mystery and tension. It isn’t until the third sentence wherein the door is identified. Even in the second paragraph, when more of a description of the door is given, there hangs in the air a feeling that the door is unnatural in origin. Then to add to the tension, it is shared that this couple has been in therapy in an attempt to save their marriage. Once they decide how to pass by/through the door, and do so, the uneasiness of the situation fades, and seems to be setting up a metaphor for the couples’ relationship. But there’s a complications; each person remembers the encounter with the door differently.

    Was this a supernatural encounter? Is this couple like every couple, and having a moment where they remember things differently? Is the door affecting their ability to remember? Or is this misremembering an act of sabotage by one of the partners? These questions hang, and motivate the narrator, who is the husband in the couple. Truth isn’t the goal, when an answer, a conclusion, or closure is what’s needed.

    Scott does an excellent job creating tension, unease, and relatability in this work. The husband’s need and search for an answer from this unusual event underscores his desire to create stability and peace in this rocky marriage. I don’t know a single person who hasn’t agreed to a lie to keep a fight from bubbling up in their relationship. In this story, you can feel the eggshells the husband stands on, and the fear that this could be the event to push this marriage over the edge.

  • Short Story Review: “Intimacy” by Ayşegül Savaş.

    (The short story “Intimacy” by Ayşegül Savaş appeared in the October 20th, 2025 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Photograph by Elinor Carucci

    “Intimacy” by Ayşegül Savaş has been sitting with me for a couple of days now. I’ve read it three times, and I am still mulling over the construction of it, the theme, the use of language, and the lack of it as well. I keep thinking that there is a simplicity to this story, but that is just an illusion to its complexity. I want to believe that I would never behave like the protagonist, but honestly, I completely behave like the protagonist. Savaş uses the normal short story tricks; foreshadowing in the first paragraph, use of the rule of three, and uses the death of a character as the climax. But Savaş uses these tricks, and a few others, is such ingenious ways, that this story feels fresh, and left me wondering, and I mean this in an intriguing positive way, what is going to happen next?

    To describe the plot I feel is rather a meaningless exercise as it won’t get to the heart of what makes this a compelling story. Here goes anyway: In an unnamed city, there is a group of expats from an unnamed country. The groups tries to support each other in adjusting to life in this new city, and to that end our narrator, who is a published writer, is connected with an older and very successful writer from the same expat group. They have lunch together. The lunch goes well, and eventually the older writer brings his wife to a lunch and the narrator and wife hit it off. Then the narrator and the wife go out and have a picnic together which also goes well, but the narrator drops returning text messages from the wife. One reason is that the narrator’s very young daughter breaks her clavicle. Through a dinner party later in the story, the narrator learns that the writers wife is ill. And maybe that’s a good place to stop.

    Through the story I kept wrestling with what to make of the narrator. On one hand, I was perplexed by some of her decisions, but on the other hand, I had to admit I have made the same choices that she does. Such as when talking to the writer about traveling back to their home country, she omits telling him how her children cried and complained wherever they went, but made it sound like the trip was ideal. Not exactly a lie, but also not the truth. In another example, she doesn’t inform the daycare of her child’s fussiness which could help explain when the kid’s accident occurred. Her reasons for the omissions are understandable, but in another light of perspective, she could be viewed as manipulative. These are but two examples the narrator makes that left me with a feeling of ambiguity, which played well into the theme of this story.

    Then there was the use of language. As I alluded to before in the description, virtually everything is left unnamed. No cities, countries, locations, and especially proper names. Only two are used, and they are deliver deliberately to have the perfect impact on the story. Not only do the name reveals play into the theme of intimacy, but it also ties back into the motivations of the narrator. Why does she choose to reveal them at that time and in that manner? Furthermore, the language is smart, direct, cutting, but also vacant and void of a deeper meaning or connection. The narrator’s word choice appears to be open, but they are a defense, keeping people away.

    Through all of this, I have been chewing on the theme of “Intimacy.” What is Savaş trying to say about how people open up, and close themselves off? The narrator mentions a husband, and how they cooperate to take care of their children, and work, but she never shares any feelings about him. It’s never expressed that there is an issue between them, but then why is his name never shared with us? Most importantly, the wife of the writer makes efforts to connect with the narrator, which the narrator ignores. The narrator only changes her attitude when she find out the wife is ill. A rather shallow reaction, made worse by the narrator using her daughter’s injury as the explanation/excuse for the ghosting. Most people share themselves to form connections, but do some people share out of guilt? Sharing enough to stay relevant while still distant?

    “Intimacy” is my favorite type of story; one that I read over and over to discover more details and motivations, which enriches the story further. I keep thinking that I should be annoyed and disappointed with the narrator but I find her failings makes this character all the more human and believable. This story wonderfully confounds me. But so do most of the people I love. And they might say the same thing about me.