SOURCE: "Making Literature," in The Nation, June 24, 1996, pp. 31-32.

[In the following review, Amdahl strongly praises Berriault's work and asserts that she is a powerful force against the mediocrity of modern fiction.]

In the absence of a certain peculiar force, the American short story declines swiftly toward the uniform. This may be true of all human endeavor, but in the case of our short fiction, the degenerate form has been made to seem the acme of the art. The teaching of it is liturgical, the writing pious and intolerant of deviation, the reading devotional, the publishing straight-faced. It has been one of the most relentlessly banal decades in the history of U.S. literature, but, I'm happy to say, it's over: A collection of new and selected stories by Gina Berriault (serious readers in the late fifties and early sixties will know this name—she wrote three novels...