short stories – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

The Land of Sweet Forever: Stories & Essays by Harper Lee

By Scott J. Pearson | October 26, 2025October 27, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Most Americans have read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird at some time throughout our lives. It’s the clearest account of Jim Crow’s effects on Southern American culture and of the power of a few upright people to fix it. Lee’s Alabama roots are well known, but she actually wrote the classic in New York City. Beforehand, she wrote a series of short stories with themes that forecast her great accomplishment. Posthumously, those stories have…

Fiction-Stories

Walk the Blue Fields: Stories

By Scott J. Pearson | May 3, 2024May 3, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

Claire Keegan’s tightly constructed short stories never cease to enthrall me. This collection poses no exception. Each story takes its own life. They do not take long to read, but oh, they take long to ponder! A couple of these stories are in other collections, but each one provided a treat at the end of a workday. My favorite in this anthology is the last story: “Night of the Quicken Trees.” It tells of two…

Fiction-Stories

Antarctica by Claire Keegan

By Scott J. Pearson | April 13, 2024April 13, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

I have recently fallen in love with Claire Keegan’s short stories! This collection contains her earliest published works. Some of the stories are strange and leave me wondering what the point of such grotesqueness was. More than once, I flipped back through the story to skim it again so that I can understand the action better. Consistently, stories have a twist at the very end that makes each word of an entire meandering piece come…

Fiction-Stories

Cut & Thirst: A Short Story

By Scott J. Pearson | April 2, 2024April 2, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

Three friends get together to support their college friend Fern suffering from a seemingly incurable cancer. The friends, all writers, want to do all they can to support her, also a writer. Though Fern was the most financially successful among the group, they feel that certain negative comments from critics have shortchanged her literary career. As a parting present, they want to serve vindictive justice to her critics as a gift for Fern. What form…

Fiction-Stories

So Late in the Day: Stories of Women & Men

By Scott J. Pearson | March 31, 2024March 31, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

Irish short story writer Claire Keegan here shares three succinct short stories to delight readers’ imaginations. Each of them bears her eloquent style with plot twists all the way until the last sentence. This collection has three stories about the tenuous relationship between women and men. “So Late in the Day” describes a romance as it evolves from courtship into engagement. In so doing, it comments on how the social mores in Ireland about marriage…

Fiction-Stories

Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick

By Scott J. Pearson | January 16, 2021January 16, 2021 by Scott J. Pearson

Zora Neale Hurston was one of the pioneering authors during the Harlem Renaissance and is most well-known for the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. This work is a compilation of short stories published during her life. Many of these short stories are previously unavailable to a wider audience. Together, they open a tall and wide window to African American life in Eatonville, Florida, Hurston’s hometown, and Harlem, New York, in the early twentieth century.…