Reading, Writing, and Me

Intimacies  by Lucy Caldwell Thoughts: Short story collections are so difficult because they usually end up feeling somewhat unbalanced. There's the blockbuster short stories that necessitate the volume in the first place and then there are stories that feel like they exist to fill space in the book. I think this is part of the problem with selling the general public on short fiction and collections and anthologies (where this feels like an even more pronounced issue). I can say all these harsh things about collections here because Caldwell manages to bypass these pitfalls beautifully in her 2020 collection, Intimacies .  This is a tight collection of eleven stories that all center mothers with young children navigating motherhood and their larger place in the universe. Now, this probably sounds like a strange collection for me in particular to be raving about as it's a topic I find personally sticky and also have no firsthand experience of myself. I didn't honestly know th...