A Relative Stranger: Stories

I loved the title story--it had this line that felt just perfect to me ("I have never had a car worth locking; it was not a goal.") I also really liked Fenstad's Mother, Westland, and Snow (which has an awesome first line: "Twelve years old, and I was so bored I was combing my hair just for the hell of it"). There were several stories I didn't care for, but some of these were really impressive.

In The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, James Wood’s writes that for a piece of fiction to be successful, it must allow itself to be brought to completion by the reader. For me, a story should allow the reader to live within its characters and even after the story is completed, the reader will give life to those characters by imagining how the story could be continued. Like Woods, I believe that a story should give us a “true lie” by creating narrative consciousnesses so artful that the reader believes in its reality. And if we believe in the reality of the characters and of the story, it will be impossible to put the story down and abandon the pages. The story will continue with the reader.
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