In 2013 I read and posted on two wonderful short stories by Rebecca Lee, from her debut collection, Bobcat and other Stories. I was recently kindly given a D R C of a forthcoming collection of short stories edited by Ben Marcus, New American Short Stories and was very pleased to see a story by Rebecca Lee was included. I will be posting, I hope, on a number of the stories from the collection and will just say now that I predict it will be very well received for its mix of big name writers combined with exciting emergers.
The only way to read "Shatland" is, as far as I know, in one of the two anthologies in which it is included. Like both of her prior stories I read, it deals with, in part, an academic family. This one centers on the daughter. Her parents are worried about her as she has seemed depressed lately. The father has her visit a professor of child psychology. The girl is troubled because she thinks, rightly, that her father is having an affair. The counseling session is an odd one but interesting. We flash ahead twenty years. The woman is now working as a soil scientist. She has a Romanian boyfriend, a geologist who works with her father. She begins to suspect that he has a wife and kids back in Romania. I will leave the rest of the very intriquining plot untold.
I greatly enjoyed this story. I am looking forward to reading all the stories in New American Short Stories edited by Ben Marcus.
Mel u
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