Instead of a Post of Substance...

I'm too busy to actually write anything that requires thought, so instead I will give you my favorite encounters with YouTube this week, both from British TV:

An inspiring triumph over preconceptions. (No, not my favorite song by a long shot, but a moment to be treasured.)

Cthulhu Mastermind.

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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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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

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Ghosts
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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.

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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.]

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Gardner Dozois (1947-2018)

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