Short Stories

Unstoppable : Joyce Carol Oates's "Dear Husband," (Ecco, $24.99) is savage, poetic and ruthless. Oates deals with characters and themes she has often covered before -- violent men, desperate women, lives scarred by alcohol and poverty -- but her touch has never been surer, her insights never more piercing. At least one of these stories ("Landfill") can break your heart, and several of the others, astonishingly, are among the best things she's ever done. Oates's naysayers, who are legion, will someday come to accept that we are witnessing the steady...

A lot of old operas are based on even older stories. The new opera " Paul's Case ," which had its world premiere Saturday by UrbanArias at Artisphere in Arlington, is based on a 100-year-old tale. Willa Cather's short story , once a staple in English classes, was adapted by Gregory Spears into an arresting little piece that communicates its haunting story with clarity and a sense of inevitability. With a libretto co-written by Spears with Kathryn Walat, the tale of a boy in...

Alice Hoffman may be the most uneven writer in America. A trip through her enormous body of work — for adults and young people — is a jarring ride, from the loveliness of " Illumination Night " to the schlockiness of " The River King . " Hang on tight and you'll swerve from the quiet power of her short stories in " Local Girls " to the groaning hokiness of " The Ice Queen . " In bestseller after bestseller, she explores women's...

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly said the Saturday Evening Post no longer existed. Although the magazine did shut down in 1969, it reopened several years later and now publishes six issues a year. This version has been corrected. In college — before the smartphone; h eck , before the cellphone — short stories were held up as the highest form of prose. Professors assigned us Ernest Hemingway, John Cheever, Flannery O'Connor and Raymond Carver.

If a lot of recent fiction is inward-looking, safe, middle-class and domestic, then these three collections provide a bracing antidote. All of them are concerned with outcasts and loners, the has-beens and never-weres, the powerless and underprivileged, territory that often is left unexplored by the cosmopolitan, bicoastal writers who dominate the literary landscape. This is fiction taken straight, with no chaser. Sherman Alexie's Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories (Grove, $27)

Three brothers have launched a free publication for short stories in the D.C. area. Metro riders got their first chance to read " 20 Minute Tales " on Wednesday at Medical Center, Van Ness, Cleveland Park and White Flint stations. The 16-page tabloid is the brainchild of 33-year-old publisher Dave McQuaid and his brothers Danny, who is the editor in chief, and Michael, who is the director of sales. At a time when newspapers and fiction are in a race for the title of...

The short stories collected in "The Angel Esmeralda" span the majority of Don DeLillo's long and tremendously accomplished career. The earliest piece dates from 1979, eight years after DeLillo's first novel, " Americana . " The most recent was published this fall in Granta . The most surprising thing about the book, then, is that it exists at all: Forty years of writing is a long time to wait to publish one's first collection of short fiction....

Edward Paul Jones is sitting at a table in Guapo's restaurant in Tenleytown early on a midsummer evening, looking down into a glass of red wine. Nobody in the place recognizes him, although he's arguably the greatest fiction writer the nation's capital has ever produced. His three books, two of them collections of short stories set in black Washington, have been hailed as masterpieces. He's won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critic's Circle award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, a MacArthur "genius grant," the Lannan...

As states across the country implement broad changes in curriculum from kindergarten through high school, English teachers worry that they will have to replace the dog-eared novels they love with historical documents and nonfiction texts. The Common Core State Standards in English, which have been adopted in 46 states and the District, call for public schools to ramp up nonfiction so that by 12th grade students will be reading mostly "informational text" instead of fictional literature.

Watch closely on a Monday morning, and you'll see them everywhere — sallow-faced, rumpled, hungover and broke. They won't make eye contact; the risk of one more social interaction is too great. They have smiled and chatted and wept and danced all weekend. What they want now is to go back to bed. They are the wedding-goers, in a marathon. These ragged souls don't have two or three weddings to attend this year. They have six, maybe eight, plus a shower, engagement party and...

Thursday, Feb. 14 "Calvert Conversations," local-history discussions. 10-11 a.m., Calvert Library Twin Beaches branch, 3819 Harbor Rd., Chesapeake Beach. Free. 410-257-2411. "My Furry Valentine" pet adoptions, special rates at the Tri-County Animal Shelter, noon-5 p.m. weekdays and 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturdays. 6707 Animal Shelter Rd., Hughesville. Dogs, $50; cats, $5. 301-932-1713 or 800-903-1992 or www.charlescountymd.gov . "Kids Just Want to Have Fun," for children in kindergarten through third grade,...

For so long as I can remember, Washington has suffered from a bad literary rap. Its literature is assumed to consist of ephemeral books by journalists about ephemeral events, ephemeral hack novels about ephemeral melodramas on Capitol Hill and at the CIA, and ephemeral, not to mention unreadable, presidential memoirs. Well, over the years this city has managed to produce plenty of those, but as the accompanying list of suggested reading makes plain, it has also inspired work of quality, variety and, in some cases, genuine...

In an Alexander McCall Smith book, main characters are so careful of the feelings of others that they can spend hours parsing an interaction with a grocery store clerk and use marmalade to unlock the mysteries of humanity. Then there's Professor Dr. Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld of "Unusual Uses for Olive Oil. " The scholar at Regensburg's Institute of Romance Philology combines the demeanor of an absent-minded professor with the vanity of a Real Housewife. (Also, it's best to keep him away from...

If a lot of recent fiction is inward-looking, safe, middle-class and domestic, then these three collections provide a bracing antidote. All of them are concerned with outcasts and loners, the has-beens and never-weres, the powerless and underprivileged, territory that often is left unexplored by the cosmopolitan, bicoastal writers who dominate the literary landscape. This is fiction taken straight, with no chaser. Sherman Alexie's Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories (Grove, $27)

Bookstores crumble under Amazon's hegemony. Book sections vanish into journalism's glory days. And book critics fade behind a cacophony of online reviews. But Oprah abides! In the latest demonstration of Her awesome power, the talk-show diva smiled early on a debut novel scheduled for release in January. Knopf, one of the nation's most prestigious publishers, immediately bowed to O's wishes, more than doubled its print run and moved the release up a month — into the...

As states across the country implement broad changes in curriculum from kindergarten through high school, English teachers worry that they will have to replace the dog-eared novels they love with historical documents and nonfiction texts. The Common Core State Standards in English, which have been adopted in 46 states and the District, call for public schools to ramp up nonfiction so that by 12th grade students will be reading mostly "informational text" instead of fictional literature.

FORD COUNTY By John Grisham Doubleday. 308 pp. $24 "Ford County" is a collection of short stories by a man who has sold millions of copies of his legal thrillers in this country alone. John Grisham is still in the prime of his writing life, a devoted baseball fan, a devout Baptist who has done missionary work in Brazil, a rural Southerner who practiced law in a small Mississippi town for nearly a decade at the beginning of his literary career. He's a writer whose paperbacks can be read without embarrassment by businessmen on...

In January 1958, reviewing "The Music Man" for the New Yorker, Wolcott Gibbs confessed himself utterly baffled as to how musical comedies are put together: "I have no idea how the damn things get there in the first place — by what weird midnight prodigies of collaboration — and I certainly have no coherent advice to offer anyone about fixing things up, being comparatively accomplished only in the construction of English sentences, a knack approximately...

Know some young engaged couple who shouldn't get married? Wrap up a copy of " Prosperous Friends " and toss it into the bridal shower like a molotov cocktail. Christine Schutt ‘s artful little novel is mixed from crushed hopes and laced with the essence of despair. No one who opens it could walk down the aisle untroubled. But at least the chastened lovers will have something good to read. At 64, Schutt hasn't written much compared with her book-a-year colleagues, but...

She declared that this year her resolutions would be real. On the 1st, she would improve her entire identity. She'd become a kinder person, A. B, she'd be a prettier person by tending better to her grooming and her posture. C, she would be smarter, by spending at least 10 minutes a night reading the dictionary and/or tackling a word game. To further cement the plan, she took a calligraphy class on a Saturday afternoon and learned enough about quill, ink and paper to write the statements out in silky...