Cassie McCullagh

How much do you think about where stories sit next to each other and what point you're making as a book as opposed to what you're doing in an individual story?

That's a great question, Kate.

Does that mean it's an impossible one?

Well, and also, I mean, I guess like Robert Drew, Weidman is a writer who's been working for a very long time and he has things that he wants to address.

And I should say that John Edgar Wideman's American Histories is published by Canongate.

Okay, what else is in this library bag of stories today on the bookshelf?

It's Lauren Groff.

Now, you might remember her novel Fates and Furies or The Monsters of Templeton, but she's well known for her short fiction too.

And, Rowena Gonsalves, you have read the new collection, Simply Called Florida.

Now...

Florida's full of snakes and alligators if these stories are anything to go by, aren't they?

She creates entire worlds in her short stories.

And they're, I mean, apart from the snakes and alligators, they're very different world, aren't they?

We're inside the lives of particular characters.

And sometimes we get whole lives in one story.

I found myself liking her longer short stories more than her short ones.

And I think that was because, I mean, it's wrong to say they felt like they could have been novels, but they were almost novellas.

I loved one and I actually like her titles as well.

Cassie had pointed out earlier in the Sittenfeld book that some of the titles in her collection were a little bit heavy handed, whereas these are more ambiguous.

So the one I really liked was called At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners, a story of a boy.