ALISON ARMSTRONG explores the dark and sometimes violent world of Breece D’J Pancake’s short stories: ‘The hard-hitting stories are set in rural West Virginia, where the characters labour to survive in a blighted landscape of failing farms, industrialised remnants of mines, and nature struggling to reassert itself.’
JL BOGENSCHNEIDER finds humanity in Richard Yates’ short story ‘Fun with a Stranger’: ‘He has a particular knack of empathising with even the most flawed of his characters; fanning out their vulnerabilities like a poker hand to prove that they’re human, like the rest of us…’
ALEX RUCZAJ explores the shapes and patterns of story writing: ‘In Kurt Vonnegut’s wonderful lecture on the shapes of stories, he draws curve after curve on his blackboard, showing the story arc – the ‘beautiful shapes’ that all traditional stories follow…’
PAULINE MASUREL recommends the second posthumously published collection of early Kurt Vonnegut stories and finds that his prescient voice still has a great deal to tell us about the world we live in, today.
