SOURCE: "The Walking Wounded," in The New York Times Book Review, July 7, 1991, p. 5.

Hampl is an American poet. In the following excerpt, she praises the introspective quality of the stories in The Foreseeable Future.

Less than a generation ago, the short story, having lost its home in America's popular magazines, seemed also to have lost its place in contemporary writing. The New Yorker was the only weekly still publishing and paying well for short fiction, along with monthlies like The Atlantic and a handful of women's magazines. The baleful warning of the Visiting Writer comes back, telling a short-story-writing class: "The market has dried up." The year was 1969. His advice to the room filled with graduate students with thin piles of short fiction before them on the seminar table: "Write novels."

But dried-up market or no, the short story refused to bite the dust. Maybe the popular magazines...