News & Events
Bill’s Books: Two Books of Interlocked Short Stories
Bill Goldstein recommends the best reads in all genres. His segment airs Sundays on ​“Weekend Today in New York.”
What books are on your night stand?
A mishmash of pleasure reading — ​“Passing,” by Nella Larsen, ​“Second Place,” by Rachel Cusk, ​“The Book of Form and Emptiness,” by Ruth Ozeki, ​“Trust,” by Hernan Diaz, ​“An Immense World,” by Ed Yong — and books for a possible essay related to Dorothy Wordsworth: Dorothy’s ​“The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals.” ​“Home at Grasmere” (extracts from her journal interleaved with William’s poems), edited by Colette Clark. Frances Wilson’s ​“The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Life.” Stanley Plumly’s remarkable ​“The Immortal Evening” and also his ​“Posthumous Keats.”
Andrea Barrett is the winner of the 2015 Rea Award for the Short Story. The annual $30,000 Rea Award recognizes a living U. S. or Canadian writer. Rea established the award to honor a writer who has made a significant contribution to the discipline of the short story as an art form.
This year’s jurors, noted writers T. C. Boyle, Bill Henderson and Karen Shepard, offered the following citation:
In three collections of stories and six novels, Andrea Barrett has continually enlarged the geography of her imagination, and her lucky readers have been the beneficiaries of those explorations, experiencing, as her characters so often do, the way our own small pasts bear on our own small present. Barrett offers us the news from other worlds as a way to understand our own. In settings ranging all over the globe and from all different time periods, she specializes in examining what’s particularly human in the science we do, bringing those traditionally disparate worlds to bear on each other in surprising and moving ways. And she accomplishes those broad thematic implications with a precise and quietly intelligent style that surprises and disturbs and gratifies. That deceptive formal modesty keeps our focus on the world at the fiction’s heart and produces testimonies designed to celebrate the attested rather than the attester. The result has been a body of stories that like all great fiction expands our knowledge, brings us more fully into contact with the suffering of others, and supplies intense and gorgeous pleasure.
“The Years and The Years,” an essay on writing, was published in AGNI 82, November 2015.
Archangel was selected as one of three finalists for the tenth annual Story Prize.
Heroines in the Garden discusses the stories in Archangel, groundbreaking theories, and the pain of change: ​“While we do not regret the knowledge, we also know that every gain is also a loss, here the loss of the certainty that everything makes sense because it is all from the mind of the creator, arising from a single cause. Moreover, profound uncertainties about love, and about the possibility of happiness, beset the characters in these stories even as they search for clarity in new knowledge and understanding of science. Like Darwin, and Einstein, and all her other heroes, Barrett the storyteller pulls us relentlessly away from false comforts, into the dazzling, often chaotic, world as it really is.” Read the full article.
“The Particles” was published in this year’s O. Henry Prize Stories, selected by editor Laura Furman and with essays by Lauren Groff, Edith Pearlman, and Jim Shepard on their favorite stories.