Only Stories

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 collections. Anyone who was besotted by The Brothers Grimm tales as a child (meeeeee) will see Alameddine’s novel as its next-of-kin: a single narrative spliced and remixed with Arabic and Jewish folk tales. I can’t recommend it enough.

As for this wee Tumblr, well, I’m loathe to let a good blog theme go to waste. Maybe you’ll see us resurrect this thing sometime soon, or maybe it’ll metamorphose into an image dump, like every other Tumblr. Either way, keep an eye out for us.

—Pam

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!

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 The 27th writer, Pinchas Pelovits, is a clerical slip: he’s an unpublished writer, a mere enthusiast of books.

However, as the published writers face down their impending executions by bickering over their respective achievements, Pinchas is hard at work writing a story that floors them all. Pinchas’s story ends with the question “Which one of us is to say the prayer [for the dead]?” A valid point: who writes the eulogy when all the writers have been executed?

In this interview with The Atlantic Monthly, Nathan Englander nominates himself. “The Twenty-Seventh Man,” he says, “was my permission story, about making the decision to write.” Can’t wait to see what he follows this manifesto of a story with.

—Pam

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 one town in Yemen to another town in Yemen. Nothing happens, except that the lawyer briefly thinks that the soldier is going to kill him. Then they pray.

One notable detail is that Abdul-Wali fled to Russia and took some literature courses there. You can see the Russian paranoia and dread-filled attention to detail when the lawyer imagines the sounds of a sequence of moves that lead to his death at the hand of the soldier’s gun.

Ah, well. I’ll give this collection another chance. Yahya Taher Abdullah, yer up!

—Pam