Rebecca Rosenblum on What Constitutes a Good Short Story

Published: Nov. 1, 2008, 5:45 p.m.

This is part one of a series of interviews conducted with three acclaimed short storywriters: Rebecca Rosenblum, Nam Le, and Anne Enright. In each case we riff off those qualities which Flannery O\u2019Connor thought best constituted a good short story.

We start with Rebecca Rosenblum, author of Once, " a collection of sixteen stories portraying the constricted and confused lives of the rootless twenty-somethings \u2014 students, office techies, waitresses, warehouse labourers, street hustlers \u2014 who inhabit them. These are stories grounded in the all-too-real comedy and tragedy of jobs and friendships and romances, books and buses and bodies." This debut collection won The Metcalf Rooke Award.

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