Once again, Stewart has provided us with an intriguing story
set in a gun shop. Even though the term
“brothers and sisters” in the first sentence states that both boys and girls
were exposed to firearms as children, the reader is fooled by common stereotypes
that gunslingers are generally male until page two, naturally suspecting that
the narrator is a man until she is revealed to own a purse.
“Targets in a Shooting Gallery” is written in the style of
Lydia Davis’s “Extracts from a life”.
Almost every element of Davis’s short story is mimicked in Stewart’s:
the title has a comparable structure, the narrator’s gender is deceptively
opposite to the writer’s, the text is split into small sections with headers
that often copy the theme or words of
“Extracts”, Stewart includes verse where Davis does, and the initial setting is
in a specialty shop.
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