Sunday, November 2, 2014

The ten best short story collections

Elizabeth Day is an author and journalist. Her critically-acclaimed debut novel Scissors Paper Stone won a Betty Trask Award for first novels written by authors under the age of 35. Her second novel Home Fires is also published by Bloomsbury.

One of her ten best short story collections, as shared at the Guardian:
Interpreter of Maladies
Jhumpa Lahiri (1999)

This debut collection of nine stories won the Pulitzer prize shortly after it was published in 1999 and was named the New Yorker’s debut of the year. The stories, written with what Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times described as “uncommon elegance and poise”, deal with the diversity of Indian-American immigrant experience and the curious alchemy of love and relationships. My particular favourite in this collection is “A Temporary Matter”, a beautiful mediation on grief, love and loss as a couple try to come to terms with the stillbirth of their child.
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue