Tell Me a Riddle by Tillie Olsen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There are only a handful of writers who could write four stories, collect them into a book, and have the book become essential. Tillie Olsen did write a bit more than these stories, but writing was a struggle for her due to her circumstances. She has written about her fight to find room for her voice in her non-fiction book Silences, which is hard to read and reminiscent of Joanna Russ’s thinking on the same subject: how do women find a place for themselves on the literary shelf. These stories are decades old but they retain their power. I’ve taught the title story many times; the first sentences crack a whip over the head, the sound of the words so electric, “How deep back the stubborn, gnarled roots of the quarrel reached, no one could say – but only now, when tending to the needs of others no longer shackled them together, the roots swelled up visible, split the earth between them, and the tearing shook even to the children, long since grown.” It’s like the first sentence of an Edward Jones story, it takes you right to the heart of the thing. This is beautiful writing. May it always be here.