I've said I was quitting a million times, including twice recently. I wouldn't keep doing this fake-out, except I think when I disappear, it merits an answer. I don't mean to be the dramatic guy on your social media who makes a big deal out of leaving. All I want is to leave a marker to explain why I left in case anyone is curious. Here are two reasons I'm stopping this blog and doubt I'll come…
When people who haven't been trained in literary analysis read the criticism of those who have, I imagine they often think the "pros" are just making it up and reading too much into the story. Lay people are probably prone to object, often with good reason, that "it doesn't say that anywhere in the story." I say "with good reason" because skepticism about unusual claims is typically a good thing.…
As I write this in early February 2026, I'm not quite sure how I got to where I am. A year ago, I was a senior North Korea expert at the National Security Agency. Although I never made any career decisions with the intent to make a lot of money, I was somehow making a larger salary than I ever dreamed was possible. Now, I'm nearly a year into my post-government career search. I recently dropped…
Donald Trump does so many outrageous things, it's hard to remember the once-unthinkable thing he or his administration did last week let alone in his previous administration. But in 2017, for about a week, one of the things liberals pretended they cared about and Trump supporters pretended wasn't a problem was the response to two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico: Irma and Maria. What particularly…
This must be that thing that happens once a year in blogging through a short story anthology where I have to pause to remark on how the stories in said anthology are not intentionally lined up such that two consecutive stories interact with one another. Best American Short Stories has long maintained a tradition of listing its stories in alphabetical order according to the surname of the author.…
A lot of story titles try to sneak in unassumingly and maybe even make you forget about them by page three. They also make an effort not to tip where the real heart of the story might be buried. That's true of "What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?" which was the last story in BASS I just posted about. At story's end, when I went back to the beginning and remembered that was the…
Do you get it? Because there have only been two. I’ve decided to go ahead and self-publish my NSA novel , the one I’ve been trying to get published for almost a decade now. It is not without a certain sense of shame and failure that I do this. Although there are plenty of authors now doing just fine in self-publishing, and some are even wondering, with traditional publishing in so much trouble,…
While being mostly unemployed the last ten months, I spent some time digging into the philosophy of religion. I don't just consider this to be the most interesting subject there is to study; it's the most essential. My interest in literature is really just a side quest of my main effort to figure out whether God exists. I gave a lot of thought to just becoming a full-time DoorDash driver so I…
If you've ever dabbled in cognitive therapy, you've probably encountered this adage from Epictetus that is thousands of years old: "Men are disturbed not by things, but the views which they take of them." There's a lot of truth in it, and the idea, as well as cognitive therapy in general, are fairly empowering. It's a philosophy that gives a lot of agency to its adherents. I might not be able to…
True to my word, I'm at least going to try to blog through Best American Short Stories again this year, even though I'm scheduled to begin law school in little over two weeks. Maybe it'll take me a full ten months--until BASS comes out next year--to finish. Maybe I won't make it through at all. Maybe I'll drop out of law school in two weeks like I did twenty-five years ago. Who knows? I've been…
It looks like after nine months of wandering since leaving my government job and generally feeling for most of 2025 like I don't have any great path forward with my life, I'm going to find my way to law school at some point in 2026. I got offered a full ride to the only law school that's within driving distance. I don't feel complete certainty this is the right decision. It's not the material;…
Once in a while, I put one of my own stories on this blog. They seem to get as many readers when I do this as they do when I get it published somewhere. And even if I did get this one published, it'd be hard to get it timed exactly right to come out right on Thanksgiving, which seems like the best time to read this. So here goes, one of my own stories. Herald At first, it annoyed me that Elmer…
I joked a couple of posts ago about how doing a compare and contrast was a lazy way to make it seem like I was really engaging with a story while not actually working all that hard. It's partly true and partly just a self-effacing joke. There is still some thought involved, but the built-in structure of comparing two stories does tend to make it easier to decide what you're going to write about.…
"Strange Fruit" by Yah Yah Scholfield takes the Billie Holliday song by the same name and runs with it. It extends the song's metaphor of a lynched black body, hanging from a tree in the American South, as a kind of fruit the tree has produced. In the story, an entire community of agricultural workers of color works to harvest the "fruit." A very short story, its development of the metaphor ends…
I'm almost always running out of gas by the time I get to the end of blogging through a short story anthology, and this year's run through the 2025 O.Henry Anthology, a.k.a. The Best Short Stories , is no different. I need to catch my breath. How wonderful, then, that I can do a compare and contrast post about "The Three Niles" by Zak Salih. It's the kind of post where it looks like I'm trying,…
I don't have a grand unified theory for "Rosaura at Dawn," something that makes sense of all the parts both individually and in their relationship to the whole. (I just learned the term "mereological" this week, and I could have used it there to sound really smart, but I feel like it'll be obvious I just learned it and was anxious to show off.) I do, however, have some theories about the parts…
I was pretty sure during my first read-through of "Mornings at the Ministry" by Ehsaneh Sadr that I was dealing with an unreliable narrator. Dr. Amir Musavi insists during his account of his dealings with the other, female Dr. Musavi, that he wishes her well at every turn until she becomes his supervisor, and even then that he only turns against her because of her unkind and dishonorable behavior.…
There are two kinds of stories I feel I can mostly skip over when I'm blogging my way through one of the big short story anthologies. One is a story I think so bad, so undeserving of its place in one of those anthologies, that I just can't bring myself to look at it closely. Those aren't any fun to do. The other is a story that seems to me so obviously accessible to nearly any reader, there isn't…
First, an update: I said I might have to ditch blogging about contemporary short stories in my last post. That might still happen soon, but for now, I have a little bit of daylight and might as well keep going. I had already half-written this post anyway. Having been off of work for the past almost eight months provided me with an interesting perspective for reading "Winner" by Ling Ma, which I…
All evidence to the contrary, I don't like to indulge too much in talking about myself on this blog. It started out with it being all about me, but I discovered after not too long that even I didn't find myself that interesting, so I switched to talking about what I was reading. That was a good change, and I've mostly stuck to it. I'm happy to insert my own life into a discussion of what I'm…
I had two thoughts during the first half of reading "The Spit of Him" by Thomas Korsgaard. First, what I thought I was reading was something of a mashup between Death of a Salesman and Waiting for Godot . I thought I was going to read about a salesman wandering from house to house in search of someone who might take pity upon him and buy what he was hawking. This was, in my imagination, going to…
I once knew a co-worker who shared a gene with his wife that meant they had a one in four chance of passing along a very debilitating condition to their children. They found this out when their second daughter got it. That daughter died young, but the couple, believing in God's goodness, continued having children. They had one more without the disease and then finally one more who had it again. My…
The easiest critical posts for me to write about contemporary American short stories concern stories where a lay reader might be confused what makes the story in question worth reading. I write for the intelligent, curious lay reader, so these stories feed into what I'm trying to do perfectly. I find a thread worth pulling on that might not occur to most readers, and I pull on it. The hardest…
(Personal update before launching into this: Obviously, my new job has slowed down my pace of posting here. I don't know yet if it will end my pace completely. I'm so tired right now it's hard to see how I'm going to keep pushing in posts, even delayed ones, but I've been doing this a long time and don't want it to just end yet. So I'll keep pushing forward slowly, even though everything below is…
"Stump of the World" by Madeline ffitch joins "Thunderstruck" by Elizabeth McCracken at the top of my list of great contemporary short stories about the perils of raising children. "Thunderstruck" focused on the difficulties of raising young adolescents, and how the balance between too much parenting and not enough is difficult to find, while "Stump of the World" is about how hard it can be to get…