Tag: Short Stories

Review: An Oral History of Atlantis

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Title: An Oral History of Atlantis: Stories
Author: Ed Park
Pages: 224
Release: July 29, 2025

Hot on the heels of his Pulitzer Prize-finalist masterwork, Same Bed Different Dreams, Ed Park returns with this superb short fiction collection. Twelve of the sixteen stories have been published elsewhere over the past 20+ years, but all were new to me.

Whether it’s the transcription of a DVD commentary on a cult classic science fiction film (“Weird Menace”) or a letter from an exasperated author to his overzealous translator (“A Note to My Translator”), no two stories are alike. Yet each delivers Park’s acerbic wit, sharp sense of irony, and keen eye for riffing on the mundanities of everyday life. With such variety, every reader is sure to find something to love here.

Favorite stories: “A Note to My Translator,” “The Gift,” “Bring on the Dancing Horses”

★★★★½

My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

Review: Portalmania: Stories

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Title: Portalmania: Stories
Author: Debbie Urbanski
Pages: 320
Release: May 13, 2025

Exceedingly dark, with unflinching portrayals of intimate partner violence and the isolating weight of otherness, Urbanski’s prose nonetheless shines as a compulsively readable beacon, propelling us from one uncanny world to the next.

The ever-present portals symbolize opportunities, threats, or escapes, their importance shifting depending on the characters’ perspective and circumstances.

The stories themselves are interlinked, featuring recurring motifs and situations. The characters even feel like carbon copies of the same person, with only subtle differences, as they navigate their respective worlds. These similarities lead to a sense of sameness across many of the stories, yet there is enough thematic variety to make this a bold and satisfying collection.

Favorite stories: “LK-32-C,” “The Dirty Golden Yellow House”

★★★★

My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

Review: Exit Zero: Stories

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Title: Exit Zero: Stories
Author: Marie-Helene Bertino
Pages: 208
Release: April 22, 2025

Bertino tackles heavy themes like grief, estrangement, divorce, and disconnection with the winning charm and dry wit that made her 2024 novel Beautyland such a standout. Her writing is both funny and emotionally resonant – brimming with life, verve, humor and heart.

The stories run the gamut of topics and it was amusing to see simple setups veer so wildly off course. In “Can Only Houses Be Haunted?,” a bickering couple finds that the peaches they bought from a roadside farm stand are haunted by a malign spirit. In “Exit Zero,” my favorite of the bunch, a daughter inherits a house from her estranged father – along with an unenthused, flatulent unicorn living in the backyard. Some stories, like “Edna in the Rain,” in which a woman’s ex-boyfriends literally rain from the sky, end abruptly or feel undercooked. But the majority are satisfying – both absurd and poignant in different ways.

★★★½

My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.