![]() Because we had all been raised on the power of surprise, the short stories that my class wrote for the creative writing unit.sometimes attempted a cheap and lazy kind of mimicry of the kinds of fiction we'd already read. Just last year, in the introduction to this same Best American Short Stories series, Amy Wolitzer warned against the dangers of the surprise ending:īut of course if everything is surprising, then nothing is. It could, if not handled right, feel like the familiar warnings about social media transposed into fiction rather than an organic story that happens to have social media in it.Ī second danger is that Sittenfeld is attempting a true surprise ending, a tactic that used to be standard for short stories but which is now generally shunned. ![]() One hurdle the story has to get past is that with so many non-fiction sources telling us nowadays about the dangers of social media, it's hard to keep that part of the story from having an "after school special" kind of feel to it. Neither is a new subject, but that's not the danger, since fiction always is approaching old themes in hopefully new ways. ![]() There are two targets in the sights of this story: how social media affects us and how we can misjudge others. ![]() ![]() Curtis Sittenfeld set herself up a couple of tough tasks in her short story "The Prairie Wife," the 18th entry in the 2018 Best American Short Stories anthology. ![]()
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