I AM HOLDING YOUR HAND

Myfanwy Collins

Myfanwy Collins’s collection of stories I Am Holding Your Hand is the literary equivalent of a bag of marbles: some stories are large, some stories are small, some are transparent and some are opaque. Yet each story contains the arced and swooping patterns of a tiny universe. Most of these stories are less than two pages long, and this brevity adds to the collection’s grab-bag feel: any one is as relevant as the others, though there are standouts. Particularly notable are those tales in which Collins lets her narratives breathe, gives her characters more than four pages to reveal themselves—these are the stories in which Collins’s knack for craft and execution shines brightest.