Review: Cynthia Zarin on Colm Tóibín’s “The Empty Family”

With a few—the usual—exceptions, I don’t like short stories much. I favor long-winded ones. This may be because I don’t have a particularly narrative frame of mind, and resist the idea that any particular moment—the locus of the short story—can be a definitive one. Last summer, though, at a book sale in August in the small seaside town where I have spen…