Quote for the Day

Songs, I think, have to be anatomically correct ... I always believe you gotta put a change of clothes in there ... and ... you know that type of thing ... you have to put ahh ... you know, the names of towns and ... it's good to put something to eat in there as well ... and some weather ... you just never know, 'cause folks, you know, you send them out there and the people take those songs, and they do things with them, and they need ... you know it's like a swiss army knife ... I don't know, that's the way I see it ... that's the way they are to me...

--Tom Waits

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"Stone Animals" by Kelly Link

If Kelly Link isn't the best short story writer in the U.S., then she's the equal of whoever is. I first came to this conclusion a couple of years ago when I read her story "Lull" in Conjunctions: 39, and I am absolutely certain of it now that I have read "Stone Animals" in Conjunctions: 43. (Of course, I've also read her collection Stranger Things Happen, but, much as I admire it, nothing in that book is as breathtaking as the stories she has written since it appeared, particularly the two Conjunctions stories.)

"Stone Animals" both employs and parodies the basic elements of suburban psychological realism, the sort of scaffolding John Cheever and so many other writers hung their words and laundry on: a family buying a house and moving into it, a father commuting to a desultory job in the city, a pregnant wife who is uncertain about her marriage, suspicions and allegations of adultery, existentially anxious children, a controlling boss, str…
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"Loot" by Nadine Gordimer

I've intended to write about Nadine Gordimer's very short story "Loot" for years, ever since I first read it in The New Yorker, and for some reason I actually thought I had written a post here about it.  I recommended the story to a friend a few days ago and intended to include a link to my post about the story when, after a bit of searching, I realized I'd never written the post.  Now I will fix that mistake.

From the first sentence, "Loot" is a story about time and history, about legends and imagination.  "Once upon our time," it tells us, there was a Great Event -- the greatest earthquake every recorded, the greatest of all measured "apocalyptic warnings".  Not only is it a Great Event (indeed, the Greatest of such events), but it is ours: we possess it.

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Ghosts: In Memory of Elizabeth Webb Cheney

My mother died on November 3, 2018. She was, in so many ways, my first reader and my first editor. Five days before her death, she asked me to write her something to read. I went home that night and wrote the following essay. I brought it to her the next day. Her eyesight had weakened, and she didn't have a lot of stamina, but she was able to read a couple paragraphs of it. It turned out to be the last thing I wrote while my mother was alive. I read it at her memorial service, and numerous people asked to have a copy of it, so I am posting it here for all who are interested. 


Ghosts
by Matthew Cheney

A reader of horror stories, and a fan of horror movies, I am familiar with ghosts and hauntings. As I’ve grown older, though, it seems strange to me that ghosts are typically represented as frightening, that being haunted is considered undesireable.

Certainly, screaming banshees flying through the ruins of gothic mansions at midnight aren’t exactly comforting. But I’m thinking of a dif…
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Reading Raymond Carver Now

[May is National Short Story Month. I have no idea who declared it such, but for years I've paid attention to it thanks to Dan Wickett and the Emerging Writers Network. Last year, I wrote about John Keene's sentences for EWN. This year, I thought I'd write some quick posts about stories and writers I've been reading and rereading. This is the first.]

Put Yourself in My Shoes
After finishing my doctoral dissertation a month ago, I found myself with free time to read whatever I wanted, a luxury that has been rare over the last five years. The only things I wanted to read were short stories. I needed to clear my mind of all the words and ideas and feelings that the nearly-500 entries in my dissertation's bibliography mapped, the years of skimming and mining books and also reading books over and over, slowly, carefully; both exhausting practices that developed an  intellectual armature I now felt weighed down by. One of the central topics of my dissertation is the novel…
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Gardner Dozois (1947-2018)

The first rejection letter I ever got was from Gardner Dozois. I was in 6th grade and had just learned about submitting stories to magazines; I had also just started reading my mother's boss's copies of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, which Dozois had recently become editor of. I don't remember anything about the story I submitted, but I'm sure it was awful. I don't think I expected it to be accepted, because what I most remember is how excited I was to get a letter from the editor. My parents were kind and didn't tell me it was a form letter, nor that the signature was printed onto it, not written by the editor himself. I brought it to school to show my teacher. She, too, very kindly did not tell me that thousands of people likely got just this same letter. (After a few more submissions, I figured it out.)

Dozois also edited what may be the single most important anthology in my life: The Year's Best Science Fiction, Third Annual Collection, w…
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