There Is No Long Distance Now: Very Short Stories
3.5/5
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About this ebook
In these forty life-altering, life-affirming, and extremely short short stories, the award-winning poet Naomi Shihab Nye proposes that no matter how great the divide between friends, siblings, life and death, classmates, enemies, happiness and misery, war and peace, breakfast and lunch, parent and child, country and city, there is, in fact, no long distance. Not anymore.
Naomi Shihab Nye
Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father was a Palestinian refugee and her mother an American of German and Swiss descent, and she spent her adolescence in both Jerusalem and San Antonio, Texas. She earned her BA from Trinity University in San Antonio. Naomi Shihab Nye describes herself as a “wandering poet.” She has spent more than forty years traveling the country and the world, leading writing workshops and inspiring students of all ages. Naomi Shihab Nye is the author and/or editor of more than thirty books. Her books of poetry for adults and young people include 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (a finalist for the National Book Award); A Maze Me: Poems for Girls; Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners; Honeybee (winner of the Arab American Book Award); Cast Away: Poems of Our Time (one of the Washington Post’s best books of 2020); Come with Me: Poems for a Journey; and Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems. Her other volumes of poetry include Red Suitcase; Words Under the Words; Fuel; Transfer; You & Yours; Mint Snowball; and The Tiny Journalist. Her collections of essays include Never in a Hurry and I’ll Ask You Three Times, Are You Okay?: Tales of Driving and Being Driven. Naomi Shihab Nye has edited nine acclaimed poetry anthologies, including This Same Sky: Poems from Around the World; The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems from the Middle East; Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25; and What Have You Lost? Her picture books include Sitti’s Secrets, illustrated by Nancy Carpenter, and her acclaimed fiction includes Habibi; The Turtle of Oman (winner of the Middle East Book Award) and its sequel, The Turtle of Michigan (honorable mention for the Arab American Book Award). Naomi Shihab Nye has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow (Library of Congress). She has received a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, the Robert Creeley Award, and ""The Betty,"" from Poets House, for service to poetry, and numerous honors for her children’s literature, including two Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards. In 2011 Nye won the Golden Rose Award given by the New England Poetry Club, the oldest poetry-reading series in the country. Her work has been presented on National Public Radio on A Prairie Home Companion and The Writer’s Almanac. She has been featured on two PBS poetry specials, including The Language of Life with Bill Moyers, and she also appeared on NOW with Bill Moyers. She has been affiliated with the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin for twenty years and served as poetry editor at the Texas Observer for twenty years. In 2019–20 she was the poetry editor for the New York Times Magazine. She is Chancellor Emeritus for the Academy of American Poets and laureate of the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, and in 2017 the American Library Association presented Naomi Shihab Nye with the 2018 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture Award. In 2018 the Texas Institute of Letters named her the winner of the Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement. She was named the 2019–21 Young People's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. In 2020 she was awarded the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement by the National Book Critics Circle. In 2021 she was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Naomi Shihab Nye is professor of creative writing-poetry at Texas State University.
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Reviews for There Is No Long Distance Now
11 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This was such a sweet little book. I received it as part of the Goodreads First Reads program. Forty very short stories all exploring the many ways that people communicate with each other. Some showed that no matter our proximity to others, we can create vast distances between ourselves and the people around us by simply remaining silent. Other stories exhibited how simple it can be to create connections with people. We live in a time where information can travel across the world in a matter of seconds. Like the title alludes to, great distances aren't the impediments to communication they once were. The ability to draw closer to someone, or to merely reinforce the distances that lie between two people, may ultimately depend on the way we choose to interact with others and how we express ourselves.
The stories had an easy flow and covered a lot of ground in a short amount of time. Death, growing up, displacement, fear, love, and the myriad of connections that people make in their daily lives. I enjoyed seeing some of the characters pop up again in later stories. Out of the forty stories, "Mailbox" and "Freshen Up" were the two that stuck out the most and became my favorites of the bunch. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I sometimes wonder if we're forgetting the art of the short story. While I love a good short story collection, I certainly don't read enough of them. But I'm beyond glad that I picked up the latest collection from Naomi Shihab Nye, whose lyric prose and sharp wit highlight every very short story in this collection.THERE IS NO LONG DISTANCE NOW is a collection of 40 pieces of flash fiction -- each story is under or around 1,000 words. Each one captures a moment in time -- a sliver of a life that tells a whole story. The collection is brilliant, and Nye's background as a poet is apparent in the way she uses brevity to evoke the spirit of all of these characters -- some of which overlap throughout the book. This is a must-have for anyone who enjoys reading or writing flash, and is sure to be a staple in many creative writing classrooms.