At her best, though, Schutt demonstrates that the two are by no means antithetical. And by doing so, she risks dismissal as an aesthete who composes without heart. With her rigorously poetic focus on sound and imagery, Schutt is doing something different from your average short story writer. Her attention to sound and wordcraft isn’t idle aestheticism as in poetry, it establishes mood and strengthens the sensual to produce in the reader the feeling of ideas or emotions too complex, delicate, or strange to say outright. has no desire to know how he might be described in the future: a glass of water, a flavorless man, at best, at best, on a white tablecloth a goblet of melted ice with the slightest curl of lemon in it. Reflecting on how the “scant comforts” of his youth have turned into a “lovely boxed life,” he thinks, Schutt crafted this sentence to echo, visually and aurally, Maas’s final observations of himself. After the colon, monosyllables deliver moments of observation (“whites,” “slates”) while the repetition of sounds intensifies, creating a moment of surprise when the eye and ear land on “yellows,” hues not usually associated with winter. The sentence’s smooth rhythm mimics the sweep of an eye and creates a feeling of movement that’s aided by the repetition of the terminal “s” and “t” sounds. Take this line from “Family Man,” about a family that lives “country-quiet” and the disruptions they come to crave or refuse: “From the picture window Maas follows winter colors: whites, slates, steely skies, and yellows.” If the first clause were verse, it would almost scan into iambs, with a dactyl interrupting the line.

A devoted reader of poetry - Emily Dickinson and Robert Lowell are favorites - Schutt writes musically, with intense attention to sound and cadence. Widely praised for her craftsmanship, Schutt delivers precise and novel observations, such as “the luggage-colored oak leaves” that mark autumn and “the shape of a man blued by symbols” to describe a lover. The collection is unified by an aesthetic that John Ashbery described as “pared down but rich, dense, fevered, exactly right and even eerily beautiful.” Ranging from a few pages to the length of a novella, these 11 stories are animated by a concern with loss and grief, dysfunctional families, self-knowledge, and dignity. BREVITY, TAUTNESS, RIGOR, SURPRISE: these are the commonly accepted qualities of a good short story, and all are on display in Christine Schutt’s new collection Pure Hollywood.

Christine schutt pure hollywood