Sara’s Reviews > The Art of the Short Story > Status Update

A Small Good Thing by Raymond Carver. This is not the first short story by Carver that I have read. I like his clear and precise storytelling. He makes the events seem completely real by all the commonplace details he is able to use without distracting from the storyline.

Jorge Luis Borges - The Garden of Forking Paths - Interview Questions
Even the questions and answers shot right over my head.
He does consider reading as real an experience as visiting London. "Many people are apt to think of real life on the one side...then you have on the other side imaginary life and fancy that means the arts. I don't think that distinction holds water. I think that everything is a part of life."

James Baldwin - Sonny's Blues - Race and the African-American Writer.

"I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly."

"One writes out of one thing only-one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from the experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give."

Margaret Atwood - Happy Endings - On the Canadian Identity
The short story seems very dated to me, but the essay is terrific.

Format = short biography, story, essay on either the story or the telling of a story by the author.

1. Achebe - Dead Men's Path - Modern Africa as the Crossroads of Culture. "I believe two things were in my favor-that curiosity, and the little distance imposed between me and it by the accident of my birth."
2. Sherwood Anderson - Hands - Words not Plot give form to a short story. Like color to a painter.