I did it! I reached my total short-story goal today, although I am still a smidge behind on the recent-story half of my goal, so I will get two more in over the next week.
99. “Two Truths and a Lie,” A.E. Stout, in Virginia Quarterly Review, 2020
A young woman struggles to figure out how to fit in to normal life in the workaday world. The story is slightly confusing and I found some of it a little too on-the-nose; I would prefer the metaphors to be a little less explicitly spelled out. For example, at one point the protagonist looks at the famous Hubble Telescope picture of the Eagle Nebula called “Pillars of Creation,” and she muses:
100. “Mirror Girls,” Kira Bell, in Southeast Review, 2020
This story is pretty great; if you only follow one link among all these lit-mag stories I’ve posted, let it be this one. It is a magical-realist extended metaphor about two young women, identical twins. One day, one of them begins to grow and the other begins to shrink. I don’t think I want to say more than that; I’ll need to read it again and give some thought to the myriad ways the metaphor can be interpreted. I just really appreciate the cleverness and the cleanness of it. (One rather odd thing that comes up early is Bell’s choice of the word “lover” to describe the narrator’s current and past partners; I happen to love that word, and get to use it often enough in my stories that take place in 1950, but it’s odd to see it in a modern context—odd enough that it must have been a deliberate, considered choice.)
100/100 read, 48/50 from the last five years.
99. “Two Truths and a Lie,” A.E. Stout, in Virginia Quarterly Review, 2020
A young woman struggles to figure out how to fit in to normal life in the workaday world. The story is slightly confusing and I found some of it a little too on-the-nose; I would prefer the metaphors to be a little less explicitly spelled out. For example, at one point the protagonist looks at the famous Hubble Telescope picture of the Eagle Nebula called “Pillars of Creation,” and she muses:
My preference would be to cut that back, let the same point be made but with a little more work for the reader to do to connect the dots. Still, I liked the story enough to read it twice, to try and figure out the parts that confused me. At the end, the protagonist returns to the office from which she has been fired (or, maybe not; by story’s end it’s not quite clear what parts of it are reality), and though it is broad daylight, the place is deserted, and she sits alone at her cubicle.
100. “Mirror Girls,” Kira Bell, in Southeast Review, 2020
This story is pretty great; if you only follow one link among all these lit-mag stories I’ve posted, let it be this one. It is a magical-realist extended metaphor about two young women, identical twins. One day, one of them begins to grow and the other begins to shrink. I don’t think I want to say more than that; I’ll need to read it again and give some thought to the myriad ways the metaphor can be interpreted. I just really appreciate the cleverness and the cleanness of it. (One rather odd thing that comes up early is Bell’s choice of the word “lover” to describe the narrator’s current and past partners; I happen to love that word, and get to use it often enough in my stories that take place in 1950, but it’s odd to see it in a modern context—odd enough that it must have been a deliberate, considered choice.)
100/100 read, 48/50 from the last five years.
You can do it!