Short Story

Merry Murders

Nothing says the holidays for me more than a good old-fashioned Christmas murder mystery. I also like the more modern ones, but give me a snowed-in estate in England, with house guests galore, a burning Yule log, a flaming pudding, holly branches cut fresh from the woods and stuck behind centuries-old…

Immigration Stories

Andrew Lam’s Birds of Paradise Lost captures the universal immigrant experience — where versions of paradise are both lost and gained — through the very particular experience of the refugees who fled Vietnam during the Fall of Saigon in 1975. Lam grew up in the American Vietnamese community of…

Egg in My Beer

“Egg in the beer” is slang for benefit, asset, boon. Great short stories offer egg in my beer, providing keen satisfaction and lasting impact with the draw of one long swallow. While a novel may take the full bottle of wine (or, for some books, a gallon of the hard stuff), a short story is, by…

Eudora Welty: Casting a Stark and Beautiful Light on the South

One nice offshoot of The Help and its new movie version, is all the attention that Eudora Welty is (rightfully) getting, ten years after her death. Welty’s incisive and beautiful ability to expose the South in all its…

G.K. Chesterton and his Unstoppable Father Brown

Yes, I finally finished reading the complete collection of Father Brown Mysteries written by G.K. Chesterton over a period of twenty-five years. I downloaded the collection onto my Kindle and over the past two months have been dipping in and out…

While Mortals Sleep: So Much That Kurt Vonnegut Left Behind For Us

Crime, by Ferdinand von Schirach: Humanizing the Criminal Mind

Crime, a collection of short stories by German criminal defense lawyer Ferdinand von Schirach, is a crystalline compendium of crime, laying out in wholly readable prose the whys and wherefores of robbery, assault, and…

“I Am That Is!”: Farewell to Brian Jacques, Who Wielded Words So Well