The Atlantic

October 26, 2006

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SHORT STORIES

Twilight of the Superheroes, by Deborah Eisenberg (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Reviewed by Mona Simpson ("New York State of Mind?", June 2006)

"The six stories here ... are her most ambitious and beautiful works to date ... Deborah Eisenberg is consummately urban, as nonchalantly and inadvertently sophisticated as Proust."

.....

The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, by Amy Hempel (Scribner)
Reviewed by Benjamin Schwartz ("Modernism, Minimalism, Fundamentalism", May 2006)

"Each of her stories—many only a few pages long, and one of which consists of a single sentence—will leave the reader shaken. All her stories, written in a perfectly modulated voice, circle around broken people and the dissolutions, disillusionments, and bereavements they endure."

.....

All Aunt Hagar's Children, by Edward P. Jones (Amistad)
Reviewed by Benjamin Healey and Benjamin Schwarz ("Cover to Cover", November 2006)

"These stories—formal in tone, precise in style, intricately imagined, and arrestingly specific in their evocation of place and time—offer an intimate and impressively varied look at African American life in Washington, D.C., throughout the twentieth century."

.....

Coronado, by Dennis Lehane (William Morrow)
Reviewed by Benjamin Healy and Benjamin Schwarz ("Cover to Cover", September 2006)

"A new collection of stories from the author of Mystic River."

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Unfinished Novel and Other Stories, by Valerie Martin (Vintage)
Reviewed by Benjamin Healy and Benjamin Schwarz ("Cover to Cover", June 2006)

"Writers, painters, and actors confront the challenges of their work and of loving one another.

.....

Nancy Culpepper, by Bobbie Ann Mason (Random House)
Reviewed by Benjamin Healy and Benjamin Schwarz ( "Cover to Cover," July/August 2006)

"A Kentucky-born historian educated in New England grapples with the two worlds that define her in this collection of linked short stories."

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Gallatin Canyon, by Thomas McGuane (Knopf)
Reviewed by Benjamin Healy and Benjamin Schwarz ( "Cover to Cover," July/August 2006)

"A new collection of stories from the author of The Bushwhacked Piano."

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Strange Times, My Dear: The Pen Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature, edited by Nahid Mozaffari (Arcade Publishing)
Reviewed by Christopher Hitchens ( "The Persian Version," July/August 2006)

"Anyone wanting to sample the range and depth of [Iran's] contemporary writing would do well to begin here. The authors not only deal with every 'transgressive' subject, from booze to sex, but also illustrate something that is often overlooked in the monochrome presentation of their country in the West: the diversity of Armenians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Azeris that help characterize Iranian society."

.....

The View from Castle Rock, by Alice Munroe (Knopf)
Reviewed by Mona Simpson ( "True North," December 2006)

"The book contain[s] her greatest hits, many of her most powerful and ambitious stories, and it should ensure a larger audience for her work. It also offers, in the course of things, stories from many stages of women's lives, the vantages ranging from girlhood to old age."

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High Lonesome: Stories 1966-2006, by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco)
Reviewed by Christina Schwarz ("A Close Read", April 2006)

"Oates is superb at suggesting the sinister."

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