Elegant stories full of a dry and subtle wit, intricately observed scenes, and a full range of emotion.
A definitive collection of stories by a Portuguese master of the form.
The stories that make up this remarkable volume are united by their quiet intensity, their commitment to internal turmoil, and their enduring interest in the lives, hopes, and miseries that are unique to women. They were originally published between 1959 and 1967 but for the most part, and except for a few small details, feel as fresh as if they’d been written just now. “He could have been a traveling salesman, a train conductor, or a sailor,” Carvalho writes at the beginning of “Life and Dream.” “However, he was none of those things because we do not make ourselves; we are shaped by circumstances.” In “A Love Story,” the narrator asks, “Did anyone admire or envy them; could anyone look at them without smirking?” An especially pathetic—and especially badly dressed— couple is being discussed, and while the story comprises fewer than 10 pages, Carvalho manages to pack it with pathos, humor, bitterness, wit, and a surprise ending as well. In many stories, Carvalho takes on heavier topics—murder, adultery—but no topic is too light or too small for her attention. In “Miss Arminda,” for example, the narrator takes the time to distinguish between the “people who knew her” and those “who thought they knew her only because they saw her pass by every morning.” This insistence on the apparently mundane is further proof of Carvalho’s masterful eye—and her abiding faith, whether stated or unstated, in the inherent dignity of women’s experiences. That’s not to say that she focuses only on women, but her gaze does tend to land on subjects that likely would have been labeled frivolous at the time she was writing.
Elegant stories full of a dry and subtle wit, intricately observed scenes, and a full range of emotion.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9781949641516
Page Count: 450
Publisher: Two Lines Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
The spirit of grace under pressure and creativity under fire animates a wonderfully diverse set of stories.
Ng selects 20 stories that illustrate why we might still read fiction in a time of disinformation and lies.
As the trials and tribulations of the 21st century have unfolded, the Best American Short Stories anthology has become a particular way of taking the temperature of each passing year. As Ng writes in her introduction to the latest group, “Short stories in particular can act like little tuning forks, helping us to clarify our own values—then allowing us to bring ourselves into alignment with what we believe. In a time when our values are being tested daily, it’s hard to think of anything more important.” Many of them are also fun to read, a quality appreciated more than ever by depressed and overwhelmed readers. The stories are ordered alphabetically, a structure maintained in the following selection, which is unfortunately limited by space. “Take Me to Kirkland,” by Sarah Anderson, is very funny, a little weird, and certainly one of Costco’s finest hours. “What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?” by Emma Binder is a cinematic mini-thriller about a trans kid visiting his hometown, terrified of being “clocked” by the people he grew up with after he saves a local from drowning. “Time of the Preacher,” by Bret Anthony Johnston, is one of several pandemic stories—in it, a snake, which may or may not be under the refrigerator, inspires a quarantine-breaking cry for help from a fence-builder’s ex-wife. Another story of that time, “Yellow Tulips,” by Nathan Curtis Roberts, also combines endearing, funny first-person narration with a more serious theme. A Mormon man in an uptight Utah suburb has to manage his developmentally disabled adult son through the complexities of quarantine. One day, he discovers that his son has “gotten into the provisions Mormons are all but commanded to keep, eating Nutella and Marshmallow Fluff from their jars.…Brig, we put these things aside for the apocalypse,’” the father says, while his son “grinned gleefully, sugary goo smeared across his lips and fingers. ‘It’s an apocalypse now!’”
The spirit of grace under pressure and creativity under fire animates a wonderfully diverse set of stories.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780063399808
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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