Good morning and welcome back to the L.A. Times Book Club newsletter. I’m Jim Ruland, a fiction writer, punk historian and a longtime contributor to the Los Angeles Times, and this summer I’ll be ...

As the saying goes, we all have stories to tell. For some authors, these stories happen to be short. Just as the price tag of a product doesn’t signal its quality, neither does an author’s brevity ...

For many years, I assumed that the appeal of a short story was that it was, well, short. Instead of slowly reading a novel over weeks, the reader of these bite-size plots can experience character ...

Are you trying to get back into reading? Looking for something easy to dip into during your lunch breaks, or in between dips in the pool while on vacation? What could be better than a book where each ...

There is a quieter, more succinct wing of literature that thrives on pithy conciseness: the short story. The authors of this art form have perfected the concept of this type of storytelling by ...

Helen Schulman is not afraid to make you squirm. Across her long and distinguished career as a novelist and short story writer, she has fearlessly explored the awkward collisions between our private ...

Ms. Renkl is a contributing Opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South. When the news is one report of human suffering — or environmental degradation or ...

An Oprah’s Book Club selection. — 3 1/2 stars (out of 4); Neva Gronert, Parker Fans of Lee’s novels may be delighted to discover antecedents for multiple characters and scenes in some of these earlier ...