Short stories Brief encounters

摘要

For sustained intensity these days, short-story collections often succeed more consistently than new full-length novels, a stack of which would surely have yielded fewer volumes of distinction than the one from which these four fine collections were taken. Perhaps the short-story collection is specially suited to catching the jangled, jump-cut nature of contemporary life—achieving a kind of cohesion by way of adjacency, as single snapshots of strangers flash past like faces on a train.