Alfred Corn, the esteemed poet and man of letters, brings his considerable gifts to Hosts, a radiant collection of short stories. Across ten pieces, his unmistakable poetic sensibility and the immeasurable storehouse of his vocabulary create a word‑lover’s paradise. These contemporary tales—of love, loss, memory, and disappointment—carry an ageless resonance, making them feel both timely and enduring. It is the kind of collection discerning readers have been waiting for.
Corn’s stories are irresistibly propulsive; one finishes and you immediately want the next, as if devouring a luxurious box of Godiva chocolates. Even characters marked by flaws—a soldier battling addiction, a tittle tattle doorman—are rendered with such warmth and clarity that they linger long after the book is closed. Corn’s affection for his creations is unmistakable.
“Kick” stands out as the collection’s triumph. That Corn, who was likely neither a heroin addict nor a Vietnam veteran, can conjure such a character with such precision—his anguish, rituals, torpor, his inner weather—is a testament to Corn’s imaginative reach and craftsmanship. Throughout the book, he exposes the absurdities, uncertainties, and small revelations that shape intimate relationships, reminding us how little we truly know of even our closest companions.
Echoes of Elizabeth Bowen surface in Corn’s prose, and one story, “Irish,” follows a quarrelsome gay couple on a pilgrimage to a Bowen‑like ancestral home reminiscent of Bowen’s Court, the author’s eponymous memoir. A ghostly undertone runs through the collection—one story even features a literal apparition—leaving readers with a lingering sense of being haunted by the people they’ve met in these pages.
I cannot recall the last time I read a short‑story collection as splendid as this. With Hosts, Alfred Corn’s oeuvre takes its rightful place among the most distinguished in American literature.
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Hosts
by Alfred Corn
Madhat Press; 140 p.