December 2011
1 post
“A gift you could give to not just your nearest and dearest but to all...”
–
July 2011
1 post
"Admission" by Danzy Senna
Breaking my silence because I felt something so strongly while reading a story: disapproval. Senna’s story starts off convincingly enough, but by the end of it, one of the conceits became so absurd that I wondered, “Why is Senna doing this? This situation stretches my credulity. Why is she stretching credulity? Is she trying to prove something? What is she proving?”
Eventually,...
June 2011
1 post
1 tag
Goodbye, Short Stories!
This year’s Short Story Month is over. I’ve read and responded to 31 stories, and I’m honestly kind of glad to give it a break. What have I learned? That short stories can do more in 20 pages than a novel can do in 300. That short stories are frequently more imaginative than novels, because there’s no pressure to explain why some creepy old dude will pay you $5 for your...
May 2011
31 posts
“New York is no place to fall in love; this is where you ought to come when you...”
– “Master Misery” by Truman Capote from New York Stories. My last story of Short Story Month, and I choose this charmer.
"My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age"...
Grace, this is my first time reading you, and I think I love you. Your fictional conversation with your father is like a kinder Art Spiegelman talking to a more affectionate version of his father in Maus.
“I really do believe that whatever is a source of shame—if you are not...”
– From the appendix to “Song of Roland” by Jamaica Kincaid
"The Bookseller" by Roald Dahl
How can I resist a short story with a title like this? But it figures that the titular bookseller isn’t making ends meet through selling books, but rather through…unsavory means!!
This story also contains an excellent screed against beards.
"Vengeance Is Mine, Inc." by Roald Dahl
Do you ever read a story about some baddies, but those baddies are so ingenious you find yourself rooting for them? And you think, somewhat morosely, “Ain’t no way these criminals are going to get off scot-free?”
Roald Dahl, at least in his adult stories, is the kind of writer who’ll let the baddies ride off into the sunset, victorious.
“Hollywood’s fine if people don’t compare it with the ideas they...”
– “Where We Are Now” by Ethan Canin. ZING!
"Attractive Modern Homes" by Elizabeth Bowen
A deeply strange story, but I should have guessed as much from the Lorrie Moore-ish title.
“Look here,” he said, “You’re batty!”
“No; I’m just noticing.”
"The Good Girl" by Elizabeth Bowen
Not for the first time, nor for the last, have I read about the semi-monied pre-war classes and been utterly baffled. This is my first time reading Elizabeth Bowen, and the details are astonishing! “Tulips lifted gay little cups of light.” And in an empty room next to a debauched party, “an outraged little clock ticked angrily in the darkness.”
"The End of the World As We Know It" by Dave...
Redemption! The introduction to this story reads “It’s an end-of-the-world story about how end-of-the-world stories actually work.” And how they work is thusly:
Everyone is dead
You are not
There is no explanation
And nothing to do.
#dark
"Judgment Passed" by Jerry Oltion
This was one my husband’s favorite stories from Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, which, yes, is sometimes the sort of thing my friends and I read. Sorry to say it, Mat, but this story blew. Not only was the writing super-ponderous, but the dialogue read like talking points from an atheist blog. At least the story had an intriguing set-up: what would you do if you returned from a space...
"City People" by Lydia Davis
In his review of Everything Must Go, David Edelstein refers to a former teacher’s characterization of Chekhov’s stories:
The author began by writing conventional narratives with twist endings and then, over time, lopped off the beginnings and twists, leaving only the suggestive essence—the model for the modern short story.
In this story, Davis has lopped off too much. The remaining...
1 tag
“We know only four boring people. The rest of our friends we find very...”
– “Boring Friends” by Lydia Davis
With perfect economy, Davis manages to encapsulate all of my (and I’m probably not alone) social anxieties. I feel both comforted and mocked.
"Shards of Reality and Glass" by Hassan Khader
I was tricked! This wasn’t a short story at all, but rather an essay about the Israeli occupation of Palestine in 2002. I’m interested in why Khader chose to write an essay over a short story. Adhaf Soueif explains:
The essay is often subtitled a “fragment,” for it is a fragmented literary response to events that Arab writers feel the need to speak to immediately without...
1 tag
"Faint Hints of Tranquility" by Adania Shibli
Can a siege be boring?
(from Words Without Borders: The World Through The Eyes of Writers)
"How to Leave Hialeah" by Jennine Capó Crucet
I don’t really want to talk about this story, which is told in the second person at first successfully and then increasingly less successfully as the story gets too particular.
I’m more interested in how Crucet wrote this story. She says, “I made a list of all the people I hated. Then I strung together versions of a few of these people [and] unleashed this narrator on them. A...
"The Black Square" by Chris Adrian
Reads like an exceptionally good post on Thought Catalog.
1 tag
"Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion...
I’ve been capricious with my selection of short stories. Not only am I pulling random collections off my shelves, I’ve also been selecting stories from the tables of contents based on whatever strikes my fancy (e.g. “Poland Is Watching”).
That approach has muddled me up this time. But in a good way: in Nam Le’s The Boat, I read the last story (“The Boat”)...
"The Boat" by Nam Le
Harrowing. And also brave.
"Some Zombie Contingency Plans" by Kelly Link
My sister: Is Magic for Beginners a short story collection?
Me: Yup.
My sister: Do you like it?
Me: Yeah...but it's really more [our younger sister's] thing. Maybe I'm getting too old, but I don't find logical inconsistencies charming anymore. When the storytelling jumps around, it's no longer awesomely twee, but just...annoying.
My sister: Yeah, that's how I felt about those Lemony Snicket books.
Me: Exactly.
"Catskin" by Kelly Link
Discomfiting. This is what I felt like when I saw The Little Mermaid, and then my dad gave me a copy of the original Hans Christian Andersen story, and I read about severed feet, searing pain, selfish princes, and unhappy endings.
"The Track of the Assassins" by Jim Shepard
Hey, now you can read along, too!
A thing that I like to do, even when I shouldn’t, is find patterns in narratives. So now that I’ve read two stories by the same author in the same collection, I am going to think about how these stories are similar and what larger idea Shepard is sharing.
This is bad. I should let each story be its own thing. I shouldn’t be drawing...
"Poland Is Watching" by Jim Shepard
What an awesome story title! Unfortunately, it’s not about that. Whatever you were thinking that meant.
I’ve had trouble with Jim Shepard’s stories in the past because they’re so detailed, and I get lost in them. But in this story, the details don’t get in the way at all—this may be a story about Polish winter mountaineers, but it’s also about repeatedly...
"The Famous Torn and Restored Lit Cigarette Trick"...
OK. I’m a bad person. I read this story because I recently streamed Eat Pray Love on Netflix (so embarrassed right now), and I was kind of in the mood to hate on something, so I figured a short story by Gilbert would fill that void. Ugh, forget being a bad person, I’m a bad Lady, because I should not suppose that just because Hollywood turned Gilbert’s story into some Julia...
4 tags
"When She Is Old and I Am Famous" by Julie...
I love Mira, the narrator. She’s alive on the page, and she couldn’t be more annoyed with her stupid scene-stealing cousin: “There are certain things I can never abide: lack of food, lack of sleep and Aïda.” All the same, Aïda is family, and Mira doesn’t want her to die or anything. She just wants her to, you know, flash her shapely gams somewhere else. Orringer gets...
“Above, about, within it all, was the rumble and roar, the hurry and toss of...”
– “Paul’s Case” by Willa Cather from New York Stories
1 tag
"A Pillar of Salt" by Shirley Jackson
I don’t get it. I’m reading a collection of NYC-centric stories published by Everyman’s Library, and the past three stories have seen naïve, excited outsiders harried and broken down by the city. Don’t get me wrong: as far as I can tell from having lived in New York City for the past five years, e’rybody loves a good grousing about the city. But New York City is like my mom—only my siblings and I...
April 2011
2 posts
September 2010
1 post
“The recent death of as many as 500 penguins who washed ashore in Brazil remained...”
– Harper’s Magazine (September 2010). Not a short story, but it could inspire one.
June 2010
3 posts
If this guy keeps it up,
book lovers the world over are in for a treat.
garyfisketjon:
….this is actually beginning, maybe.
“A short story is like a mad, lovely visitor with whom you spend a rather...”
– Lorrie Moore
"Stalking Dave Eggers" by Elizabeth Ellen
I’m not even sure what this was. An essay? A short story? Was any of it real?
If you’re a halfway-imaginative person, crushes—like that of Elizabeth Ellen on Dave Eggers—turn into obsessions which turn into imagined scenarios which turn into half-believed memories and then into full-blown alternate realities. Oh, it’s absolutely batshit, but Elizabeth Ellen has written the most...
May 2010
2 posts
"Not Literature, or, Epiphany on a Sunday Evening"...
Or, Not Epiphanic At All.
A stilted, banal story about the little moments that jar one of out of the quotidian and into awareness. The trigger, in this story, is an orange peel. But read this:
We both gazed at the orange peel and, along with it, the miracle that there are orange peels and us and everyone and everything, the whole miracle of it. There’s nothing more for me to say. We...
One More Story
I’m going to try this again, because I’m tired of lollygagging and thinking about trying this again. I seem to have lost my co-pilot, but any of you are welcome to step up to the, er, cockpit, even for just one, uh, flight. Ok, killing this metaphor. Submit your story responses here.
(Teaser: first on deck will be an Ingo Schulze story, solely based on his collection’s epigraph:...
October 2009
4 posts
Wow
OK, so it’s October 15th, and this grand experiment is over, and I certainly have very little to show for it aside from, “Man, it is hard sticking to a single form for a month,” and “Also, I cheated and have read three novels in a row.” WHOOPS!
However, one of those novels is The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine, which is almost like the granddaddy of short story...
I'm backlogged!
So… because of my own laziness (and the fact that I don’t have a huge urge to write a whole lot about each story I’ve read over this past week + some) these next few posts are going to be quick and to the point. Ready… set… wam bam thank you ma’am! -Meredith!
1 tag
"The Twenty-Seventh Man" by Nathan Englander
In this opening salvo to Nathan Englander’s much-loved story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (Meredith gave it 5 stars on GoodReads!), 27 writers are rounded up and imprisoned in Stalinist Russia. 26 of these writers are great intellectuals with minds and public reputations to be reckoned with. The 27th writer, Pinchas Pelovits, is a clerical slip: he’s an unpublished...
1 tag
"Ya Khabiir" by Mohammad Abdul-Wali
And now, for something completely different.
I picked up a copy of The Anchor Book of Modern Arabic Fiction in a fit of ambitious self-improvement. “I will be cultured and culturally sensitive!” I thought. But for all my good intentions, the first story out of this collection bored and confused me silly: it’s 3 pages long, and it’s about a soldier and a lawyer walking from...
September 2009
28 posts
"Child of God," Geoff Wyss
1) I generally shy away from stories that take place inside a teacher’s lounge AND/OR high school English classroom, both of which Wyss uses in a oh-my-god-I’m-going-to-SCREAM way 2) I’m tired of stories about older men being shamelessly aroused by much younger women, 3) Wyss’ writing is amazing, but way TOO MUCH given the subject matter. He’s trying too hard, and...
"Banger Finds Out," Kelly Cherry
Relatively simple plot that’s a wee bit heavy on the back-story. Use of Nazism as a paradigm for evil = too easy. Loved the characterizations of Plummy and Banger, although I think they both might be too likable, good, sincere, loving, etc. to be considered full characters (everyone loved Plummy in high school even though she was a raging slut? It’s a mature viewpoint to believe that...
"Quarantine," Rahul Mehta
Usually I have a hard time connecting to stories with the thesis statement “Here I am, in the USA, trying to acclimate to a new culture while trying to hold on to my native country’s traditions.” I’m sure this is just my sense of perception playing tricks on me, but it seems to be the main characters in these stories are always Indian (dot not feather [Is this shorthand for...
1 tag
Another interesting thing
I forgot to mention: When someone asked which authors Steven Millhauser looks to in formulating his fabulist stories, he replied that he prefers to read realists—that he defines his aesthetic against those of Chekhov and Flaubert, and by reading these authors, he is able to liberate his own writing.
I like the idea of reading against one’s aesthetic—might have to try that after October...