Author Archives: ksam2710

Some thoughts on the short fiction of Frank O’Connor How has your quarantine reading been going? Are you tackling those big doorstops that you’ve always meant to get to or is your attention span only focused enough for micro short fiction? Have you preferred to lose yourself in escapist fiction, bend your mind with theContinue reading “The Story Teller”

I just finished Zora Neale Hurston’s recently published collection of stories,Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stickwith an introduction by Hurston scholar, Genevieve West. As is my habit, I read the stories first and then the introduction after (more on that practice later). A number of the stories in this collection were recently rediscoveredContinue reading “Forward and Forewords”

I recently read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. I was eager to get to it after having such an outstanding experience reading his collected stories. Many of the stories that I most enjoyed were composed during the years that Fitzgerald was struggling with that novel, not to mention with his alcoholism, his wife Zelda’sContinue reading “A Few Thoughts on Tender Is the Night”

From Here to Eternity by James Jones is my first completed book of 2020. Truth be told, I began it near the end of December, but I’ll put it in this year’s column. I was inspired to read it a few months ago after I re-read Joan Didion’s essay, “In the Islands.” Near the endContinue reading “Some Thoughts About From Here to Eternity”

As I write these words I am sitting next to a bookcase crammed full of volumes. I think of this as my “possibility bookcase,” as in, I might possibly soon read the books that I have filed and stacked on its shelves. These are books that I have moved up from the larger library thatContinue reading “What Am I Going to Read Next?”