top of page
Writer's picturesibbidersdezrext

Washington Square: A Collection of Short Stories by Henry James and Other Authors



Ananya Bhattacharyya is a writer/editor based in the Washington, DC, metro area. She has an MFA in creative writing (fiction) from George Mason University and an M.A. in English literature from University of Mumbai. Her short stories have appeared in So to Speak, Phoebe, and Washington Square Review. She is working on her first novel.


Keith Banner is the co-founder of Visionaries + Voices and Thunder-Sky, Inc., two non-profit arts organizations in Cincinnati. He is a social worker for people with developmental disabilities full-time, and taught creative writing part-time at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) for over 20 years. He has published three works of fiction, The Life I Lead, a novel (Knopf, 1999), The Smallest People Alive (Carnegie Mellon Press, 2004), a book of short stories, and Next to Nothing (Lethe Press, 2014), his second collection of stories. A third collection of stories, This Is True Love, is forthcoming. He has published numerous short stories and essays in magazines and journals, including American Folk Art Messenger, Other Voices, Washington Square, Kenyon Review, and Third Coast.




Washington Square (a Collection of Short Stories)




Learning to Swim is not a collection of happy, light tales. As one critic writes, "A list of themes reads like a microcosm of the Sunday morning newspapers: infidelity to partner (three), sexual traumas (two), incest (one), age (three), suspected bestiality (one), murder and mayhem (one)." The connections and inter-relation of these stories is even more complex than that critic saw. Each plot line reappears in one of Swift's later novels as a small detail contributing to the whole. There are also several types of images that play important roles in other works. These major images include: water (rivers, streams, ponds, oceans), time (especially when talking about the generation gap), the ongoing "war of the sexes," frequently fought by married couples, the ravages of war, and a common philosophical argument about knowledge and its dangers. These images appear in some combination in almost every story, and are more fully discussed in Swift's novels, The Sweet Shop Owner, Shuttlecock, Waterland, and Out of This World. It has been a concern of some critics that Swift packs too much into each of his stories, in the words of one he "uses too many words... Swift seems to write short stories with the mind of a novelist." The partial truth of this statement is proved by the greater involvement a reader will inevitably feel when confronted with a long novel. The short story for Swift seems to have been a place to try out ideas without having to commit them to a work of several hundred pages.


Published biannually by the faculty and students of the NYU Graduate Creative Writing Program, Washington Square Review is an innovative, award-winning literary journal featuring fiction, poetry, translations, and interviews. Stories from recent issues have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and PEN America Best Debut Short Stories. washingtonsquarereview.com 2ff7e9595c


0 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comments


bottom of page