SOURCE: Collins, Anne. “The Enduring Privilege of Omission: A Crop of Short Stories—Magic, Little Lifesaving Wonderments of the Mind.” Maclean's 94, no. 14 (6 April 1981): 58-60.

In the following excerpt, Collins surveys Spencer's short fiction.

You have to be a bit of a sensationalist to like short stories, a junkie for literary thrills and chills. Short stories are where writers become immoderate, where they shed the clothes of their full-length intentions and parade stark naked as storytellers, crisis-mongers, whim-pedlars, poets. Reviewers lament the reputed death of the short story—readers, they say, don't read them, magazines have abandoned them. What this means is that they're not so profitable anymore, not that writers have stopped writing them—or publishing them. Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, John Cheever, John Updike, Eudora Welty, Ann Beattie, Ian MacEwan—how could any of them give up the occasional freedom of not having to tell you all...