As the author of one of my three favorite short story collections of 2016, I was excited to see just what was exciting to Amber Sparks. Her The Unfinished World was published by Liveright in January 2016.
The Short Story Collection No One Reads and Everyone Should: John Crowley’s Novelties & Souvenirs
Crowley is mainly a novelist, probably best known for his seminal novel Little, Big (which happens to be one of my top ten favorite novels of all time). If he’s known at all – he’s most certainly a writer’s writer, probably because he’s so damn cerebral and language-y and referential.
His short story (and a novella) collection, Novelties and Souvenirs, was published more than ten years ago, but it’s stellar and shows he has an equal gift for the short story. The novella is probably my favorite story in the book – and of course, it’s about time travel. But it’s also beautiful and like all the best of Crowley’s work, nostalgic, sad, and dreamy. (Just the way I like my fiction.)
Go and read all of Crowley, but start here. It’s a brilliant collection and worth diving into.
Sparks' bio, in her own words:
I live in Washington, D.C., but I’m really from the Midwest. The cold part of the Midwest.
I love books and art and politics and grammar and theater and music and video games and history and technology and all kinds of movies, especially monster movies and noir and spaghetti westerns and the Marx Brothers.
I have a lot of literary heroes. A partial list: Lu Xun, Italo Calvino, Wallace Stevens, Mo Yan, Phillip K. Dick, E. Nesbitt, Faulkner, Melville, Beckett, Pinter, Dostoyevsky, Ashbery, Ionesco, Dinesen, Rimbaud, Kafka, Woolf, Hemingway, Hopkins, Valery, Borges. And a million others I’m forgetting.
My political hero is the late Senator Paul Wellstone. My favorite superhero is Batman.
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