Peter Meinke

This is a wonderful collection of short stories. There are a wide variety of settings, styles and moods, but all of them are strong. I’m a big short story fan, but it’s evidently not easy to do well since too often collections are uneven, even "best of" collections. Researching this afterwards I saw that the author is mostly known as a poet and only has a couple books of stories. I was a little surprised because his prose is so good it seems like it must be his first language. His storytelling is clear and sharp, without flourishing distractions, the way I like it. Maybe he gets it out of his system in all the poetry books.

These are little slice of life stories in various settings, often moving in surprising directions. I really got a sense of the characters in the short time allowed, and that’s one of the signs of a good short story writer.… (more)