Ken Cartisano

Author bio

I abandoned short stories for novels quite a long time ago. 30-years I’d say, at a guess, and returned to them by accident about 10 years ago when I inadvertently joined a writing group with about 10 to 15 members. At first, we had 750-word stories each week, which I felt was easy enough, eventually we settled on a 1200-word limit on stories submitted every two weeks. I did this with dogged regularity for about eight years. So, when occasional critics or writers accuse me of a stodgy hubris based on how many stories I have written, they are mistaken. My feel for writing and composing short stories comes not from writing two stories a month for eight years, but from reading the other 14 stories every other week, twenty-eight stories a month, and the critiques of those stories by other more competent writers. I am still amazingly fallible, as I’m sure you can see, Trudy, of course, and not entirely objective at-all-times. But I am sympathetic to talented people who sometimes trip over pebbles, and I try to make my comments entertaining as well as positive and constructive. This is a list of some of the best books I’ve read in the last few years. All of them received a Five-Star review from me. Each one is an amazing book. All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doeer; The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Aimee Bender; The Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver; Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Marc Reisner; The Shipping News, Annie Proulx; Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, Mark Kurlansky; Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana, Jr.; The Soul of an Octopus, Sy Montgomery; Hillbilly Elegy: J.D. Vance; The Lessons of History, Will Durant; Ordinary Grace, William Kent Krueger; Life Among the Apaches, John Carey Cremony; Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Glad