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Fiction
 The petty and profound THE GRAYBAR HOTEL: 
STORIES 
 By Curtis Dawkins 
224 pp. Scribner Reviewed by Sarah Corbett Morgan Who would imagine that a murderer serving life without parole would have an MFA in writing and create masterful short stories? Not I, that’s for sure, but this is exactly who Curtis Dawkins is. His new collection of 14 short stories, The Graybar Hotel , destroys other assumptions about prisoners and prison as well.  This funny, sad, heartwarming and just plain astonishing book is Dawkins’ first published collection. He has published essays and shorts previously in several literary magazines where his publisher discovered his short stories.   It’s unclear how many of these are autobiographical; they take us from the beginning of incarceration—jail—to a court trial, the judge speaking to a defendant via closed-circuit TV, a bus transfer to a Michigan state prison, and then a life inside. We know from the acknowledgments at the back of the book that D...