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APRIL 6, 2012
Short Story Collections
If you enjoy short story collections from single authors, you might try some of these:
 
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
 
This collection of stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, blends together elements of Indian traditions and American culture. The complexities created challenge the characters to make their ways in both cultures. Lahiri’s subjects, Bengali immigrants and their American children, are observed and observe themselves as they travel the path of assimilation.
 
 
Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Butler's 15 stories, set in the Vietnamese enclaves of suburban New Orleans, capture the voices of people who have lost their homeland and who are trying to adapt to an alien culture. They are told from the points of view of various Vietnamese expatriates at different stages in the process of becoming assimilated into American culture.
 
Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff
 
This rousing collection of philosophical and thought-provoking short stories spans a wide variety of genres and time periods. Bucking the modernist tide, Wolff writes shapely short stories with structural integrity about ordinary people with desperation haunting their souls. No meditative drift or open-ended conclusions for this writer; he’s an old-fashioned storyteller in the best sense of that word.
 
Safety of Objects by A. M. Holmes
 
This collection of short stories takes place largely in the outskirts of New York City and features characters who are so well drawn that the reader begins to wonder if Homes meant for the stories to seem interconnected -- as though the action of each is happening in a single neighborhood, a neighborhood defined by dysfunction, isolation and despair.
 
A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
 
O’Connor’s short stories grab you with the first sentence and never let you go. They are deceptively simple at first but as you read you will see how the characters meld and interact with one another. These stories, by one of the most unique and important writers of the Southern tradition, evoke the south of the early 1950’s.

             


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