Matthew Klam, author of the short story collection, Sam the Cat and Other Stories, did what every aspiring new writer hopes to do — he published every single one of his stories in The New Yorker before he even had a book. In 1999, Klam …
She had a wooden cockroach, inch and a half long, hanging from each ear, and I told her, “Man, Neena, I can get you the real thing twice that size. We raise them bigger than Rottweilers in here. Nastier, too. You want a breeding pair?” …
There is a popular dictum on the children’s program Sesame Street that “asking questions is a great way to find things out.” Whenever one of public broadcasting’s flagship Muppets or moppets faces a seemingly insoluble conundrum, one of the older, wiser characters invariably exhorts them …
At a late point in Daniel Woodrell’s new novel The Death of Sweet Mister, Shug, an overweight, 13 year old boy, finds his father’s blood-filled boot in the sink. He knows his father is dead, and he immediately begins to clean up signs of the …
Unlike the stock detail of William Gay’s Provinces of Night, which wears its Southerness like a Confederate flag iron-on decal, And Venus Is Blue emanates The South as a region and a place where people live and things go on with or without a genuine …