The editor made a big thing out of not including “The Necklace,” which I think is a mistake; it’s probably his strongest story.   These are good, but it took me a while to get …

Hilaaaaaarious.   A group of people sitting around making catty comments about various movies is sometimes hard to translate to the page, but Hensley does a great job with it.   His friend Tony and …

Read it in one day.   It’s sort of a Sedaris/Mary Karr hybrid, but that’s not a bad thing, and it’s not derivative, I didn’t think, although it might seem like I thought that.   …

Probably the best written of the S.E. Hintons, but with the least likable characters.   Rusty-James is a straight-up jackass.

It’s a bit dry sometimes, but totally worth grinding through the slower spots, because it gives you a really good sense of the world at that time and the background on certain Big Moments In …

A very quick read.   The writing is somewhat uneven in terms of the diction, because Stacy Horn goes back and forth between kind of parroting tough detective-speak and writing more formally and deeply about …

I’m glad it was short, because after a while, that affected Southern Gothic business gets to be a bit much.   McCullers is a good writer, but does every character have to be fucked up …

It could have used tighter editing in several spots, but it’s very funny.

The authorial editorializing bugged me, right up until the end; DiLorenzo’s tendency to clutch his pearls dilutes his arguments.   I will admit that I don’t particularly want to believe any of the evidence against …

The title pretty much says it all.   I love Ken Smith’s writing style, and it’s a super-fast read, really interesting (but kind of depressing at the same time; the Charles Goodyear chapter is so …