Site Note

The saga of commenting systems continues... I've switched from Squawkbox, which was completely unreliable and buggy, to Enetation for comments, and will, over the next week or so, restore as many comments as I can to earlier posts. With any luck, this will be the last change in commenting systems, at least until Blogger develops a less primitive system itself.

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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 b
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Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

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The Penny Poet of Portsmouth by Katherine Towler

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"Loot" by Nadine Gordimer

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Reflections on Samuel Delany's Dark Reflections

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The Snowtown Murders

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