Errand | Literary Criticism & Book Review

Errand Critical Overview

"Errand" has been widely praised by critics since its initial publication. It has not only won its share of prizes and been anthologized numerous times, but the volume in which it appears, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories, received a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination in fiction and a Pulitzer Prize nomination for fiction. Writing in the introduction to The Best American Stories, 1988, Mark Helprin calls the story "a cold and brilliant imagining of the death of Chekhov." Mark Facknitz described it in similar terms, writing that "Errand" is a "biographical fantasy on the death of Anton Chekhov." Ewing Campbell, author of Raymond Carver: A Study of the Short Fiction discusses the story in terms of Carver's technique, claiming that it is "written in the articulate idiom of the historian with complete sentences, elevated diction, scholarly coherence, and omniscient authority." Campbell also praises the story for...
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