All posts tagged: Short Stories

Review of Sharon Berg’s “Naming the Shadows”

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by Ed Hamer Naming the Shadows by Sharon Berg The Porcupine’s Quill (2019) ISBN 9780889848665 The Stories Themselves: Sharon Berg has written a collection of short stories, really a powerful gallery of highly visual tales that evoke our desire to look into them intensely and to see deeply. Inside the tableaux, she plants the ephemera of psychic shadows and these are certainly enough to launch strong flights of our imagination.  So we are reading and interpreting at two quite different levels.  And she holds true to her initial quotation from Jung: one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious These stories are laden with darkness and it transforms the reading of the apparent into a reading of the obscure and difficult. Like visual art at its best Berg avoids prettiness and too easy legibility. Again, as with difficult visual art, Berg works to make the ritual of reading transformative — calling on us to develop solutionary insights into very difficult situations and very difficult people. Some of the Stories… …

Review of Traci Skuce’s “Hunger Moon”

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by Skylar Kay Hunger Moon by Traci Skuce NeWest Press (2020) ISBN 978-1-988732-80-0 Traci Skuce’s Hunger Moon is a well-crafted collection of short stories. While only two of these stories have the same characters, they connect by circling around a central theme: characters finding themselves at a tipping point in their lives and hungering for something more. Whether that something more is an exotic adventure, an escape from a relationship, or the beginning of a new one, the characters in Skuce’s collection all desire to expand another aspect of themselves.  The characters of the short stories are all well-developed — even the ones who aren’t the main focus of the story. I remember reading one story and thinking that the conflict was clearly between two people, but as the story itself develops, I realized that the conflict is internal, as both characters have motivation and reason for their actions, for which the reader cannot fault them. The characters also display a fairly wide range of personalities, showing Skuce’s depth and ability as a storyteller. The initial story …