I had been on a streak of reading collections packed with stories that hinged on small misunderstandings, or featured passive characters typing emails to one another and being sad about their inability to express themselves. What I love and admire about the stories collected here - and all of them are great, but I will confess to loving "Don't Look Now" and "The Birds," the two stories that open the collection, more than the rest - is that they are eventful, by which I mean: Things happen. I sat down while it was still light out, didn't move from the chair until dark and have had a hard time sleeping ever since. I was, in fact, a little bored by the prospect of reading these stories, since I'd already seen the movies, but one day a friend insisted, loaned me her copy of Don't Look Now and just said: Trust me. I'd seen the movies before reading the stories - Nicolas Roeg's masterful version of "Don't Look Now" featuring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie and Alfred Hitchcock's strangely flat-footed and clunky version of "The Birds" - so I thought I knew what to expect from Daphne du Maurier's fiction. Ethan Rutherford's fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, American Short Fiction and Best American Short Stories.Įthan Rutherford is the author of The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories.
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