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Brief and plotless, Gibbons's stories ( Five Pears or Peaches) strain for a melancholy too personally based on sentiment and more contrived than derived from everyday events, such as putting a child to bed, walking city streets, cutting down a dying elm, or the first day of school. Not really "stories,'' these vignettes (some are less than a page) are long on mood and description and short on everything else. In the sketches "He'' and "She,'' Gibbons tries to paint word pictures to evoke maleness and femaleness: "fight (sport, spectatorship, ...Log In or Sign Up to Read More