Ask a Bookseller: ‘Burner: And Other Stories’ by Katrina Denza

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

Feeling too busy lately to finish a book? Kimberly Daniels of The Country Bookshop in Southern Pines, North Carolina, would like to make an argument for reading short story collections. Specifically, Katrina Denza’s new collection "Burner: And Other Stories.”

Daniels raves about these tightly crafted contemporary short stories, in which she says a single paragraph conveys the weight of a chapter, and a short story contains a fully realized fictional world.

“The economy of being completely transformed and having your mind blown for such little time — [the time it takes to read a short story] — and to be so affected and to return to your life changed — [that’s] a pretty good value for your time.”

These are stories that explore aging, technology and the gap between what people do outwardly and what they express inwardly.

In one story, a woman gets an AI hologram so she can continue to speak with her husband, who took his life due to depression.

“This is a beautiful, hopeful story. I just love how brilliant it is, because it takes what might be the obvious thing, which is fantasy-versus-reality and technology-versus-humanity, and then flips the switch.

“It's like, no, is the fantasy that you can love someone out of a depression? And I'm not giving anything away, because the joy of reading the story is so rich. Every story is like that: just taking it up a notch.”