These are essentially horror stories, self-circumscribed by the curious objectives of the genre.
Meloy's calm, intelligent prose renders her stories' self-sabotaging characters — lawyers, unfaithful spouses, eccentric older women, Montanans — eminently understandable.
Owen has observed a marked growth, too, in the number of awards for short stories, self-published books and works by young and first-time novelists.
Like Allie Fox, the brilliant, mad and charismatic hero of "The Mosquito Coast," the men in these stories self-destruct while the women survive.
In contrast, many of her South African stories self-consciously set out to breathe life into moments of political crisis: defiance campaigns, pass-burnings, arrests under the Immorality Act.
Some aspired to more offbeat genres — children's stories, self-help guides for police leadership, biographies of criminals, tales of weird cold cases, and at least one planned to modernize stories from the Bible by interweaving them with incidents from police work.
It is a novel that illustrates just how far Ms. Moore has come in the last two and half decades from her keenly observed but jokey 1985 collection of stories, "Self-Help," which showcased her gifts as a writer but also underscored her — and her characters' — emotional reticence, their reluctance to open themselves to deeply felt experiences.
In one of those stories, "Self-correction in science at work," Bruce Alberts and co-authors wrote that "[w]e believe that incentives should be changed so that scholars are rewarded for publishing well rather than often.
Think about stories of success around you, are the main characters in those stories self-aware?
Stimulus modality can be distinguished as visual (pictures, movies) or non-visual (recorded stories, self-generated fantasies).
Sharks, as they do, circle the story – Self pulls off a wonderful tribute to Finnegans Wake, with the last line complementing and concluding the first.
