The O. Henry Prize Stories series has an extensively proven track record (89 years) in the selection of terrific short prose, and the pieces in the 2008 volume uphold that reputation. In her choices, series editor Laura Furman casts a wide net with respect to setting, narration, characters, etc. Some are the work of well-known writers - Alice Munro, Ha Jin, Edward P. Jones, Mary Gaitskill - others come from relative newcomers. The O. Henry Prize Stories 2008 is a wonderfully diverse collection - a must-have for short story lovers.

Review of The O. Henry Prize Stories 2008

Irish author and journalist Nuala O'Faolain died of cancer this past Friday. She was 68 years old.

Well known internationally for her best-selling memoir, Are You Somebody? (1996), O'Faolain had given an emotional radio interview to friend, Irish broadcaster Marian Finucane, just four weeks earlier, six weeks after being first diagnosed.

April 2008 interview with Nuala O'Faolain in the Irish Independent
Review of The Story of Chicago May by Nuala O'Faolain

Octopus-wrestling, vampire moths, and disaffected crows - oh my! I like David Quammen. More to the point, I want to be David Quammen. Back in the early 1980's, with neither scientific nor journalistic background, he stumbled into a sweet gig writing about the natural world for Outside Magazine, and he's never looked back.

Natural Acts was the title of that Outside column and the title of a 1985 collection of pieces from that column. Well, it's back, and it's bigger and better than before with the addition of longer and more recent essays in this expanded edition. Quammen's humor, his broad liberal arts view of the world, and a pen honed over decades make him one of the most engaging science writers around.

Review of Natural Acts by David Quammen

If there was ever a novel that called for a sociological flow chart, Hold Tight, a community murder mystery, is it. Harlan Coben has constructed a yarn with multiple points of view - a patchwork of tragically affected people connected to an incident of callousness and bad taste that festers into murder and suicide. And no one participant has any way of knowing how it all connects.

Review of Hold Tight by Harlan Coben

You'd think Stephen King would be smarter than to say something like this, but in a lecture at a Washington, DC high school the author told the audience, "If you can read you can walk into a job later on. If you don't, then you've got the Army, Iraq - I don't know."

None too happy about being painted as illiterates, the Army responded:

"America's Soldiers are proudly serving and fighting for us all. We can be proud of our Soldiers' selfless service, their skill and their ingenuity. They certainly are role models for every high-school student in America considering a noble career - and many book authors."

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Michael Chabon champions genre fiction in this collection of sixteen linked essays, exploring everything from Sherlock Holmes to Philip Pullman, from comic books to Norse myth. Maps and Legends is a slim book and the essays are short, yet I found myself drifting off until Chabon started delving into his own experience - as a child, as a writer - these were the essays that grabbed my attention because they better utilized Michael Chabon's greatest asset, the ability to tell a good story.

Review of Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon

It appears Israeli writer Etgar Keret has a new book of short stories out entitled The Girl on the Fridge. He spoke with NPR about the book and Jellyfish, a film by Keret and his wife which won the Camera D'Or prize at Cannes in 2007.

Keret's stories briefly find rather ordinary chaaracters in surreal situations. The Nimrod Flipout was a wonderful introduction to his work.

In the bleak future of Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods, the inhabitants of Orbus are running out of planet. The unchecked consumption of fossil fuels has finally run its course. Global Warming is no longer a disputed phenomenon or a point for political positioning. Sea levels have risen, ice caps have melted, and the planet has been laid to waste. The world has devolved to three massive urban axes: The Central Power (a thinly disguised United States), Eastern Caliphate, and the SinoMosco Pact.

Review of The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson

Jhumpa Lahiri's second collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, finds her at the rising peak of her literary powers. These stories are longer (nearly novella length in some cases) than those in Interpreter of Maladies, her Pulitzer Prize collection of short stories. These new stories reveal a clear progression of her literary power from that first collection to her first novel, The Namesake, to now.

Review of Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Earth Day brings environmental awareness to the forefront of our attention, reminding us to be conscious of our choices everyday. Do something - get active today. There's plenty of information at www.earthday.net about how one can promote planetary health through consumer and political choices.

One aspect of ecological awareness is education. We choose the books we consume, and with that in mind I'd like to call your attention to American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, published today by The Library of America.

Edited by author and green activist, Bill McKibben, American Earth collects essays from classic conservationist voices such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold with contemporary authors like David Quammen, Barbara Kingsolver, and Michael Pollan. It's truly a definitive volume born in the historical connection between environmental writing and activism. Learn more at www.americanearth.org, where you can get a copy for yourself or donate one to a library or school.