This week's New York Times Book Review includes six full reviews of story collections (if you count Andre Brink's Other Lives: A Novel in Three Parts, which I do) out of a total of nine books of fiction. It sometimes seems as though story collections don't receive enough review attention, so this is encouraging.The other five collections in the Sept. 7 issue were:
Fine Just the Way It Is by Annie Proulx
Yesterday's Weather by Anne Enright
One More Year by Sana Krasikov
The Nightingales of Troy by Alice Fulton
Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan (reviewed by lit blogger Maude Newton)
I've only read one of these so far, but all six reviews made the books seem worth reading, and I'm looking forward to the other five, assuming they're entered for The Story Prize. Reviews are obviously important because they make readers aware of particular books. And for a lot of people (at least in the New York area), if it's not reviewed in the Times, it doesn't exist. So if story collections are going to hold onto and gain readers, getting this kind of attention is crucial.
