I am a huge fan of short fiction. I devour stories by Alice Adams, tasty morsels by Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway, decadent treats by Isabel Allende, dark chunks by Poe, and those wonderful America’s Best anthologies.

I picked up New Sudden Fiction the other day, and am enthralled with Stacey Richter’s “The Minimalist” and Leslie Pietrzyk’s “Pompeii.”

I wish I could write like them — but my brain just doesn’t marry images and words the way they do.

These stories are delicious torture.