Fiction | Stories of Horror & Magic

When I decided to read a collection of short stories for the Read Harder Challenge, I was happy to find I already had a couple collections waiting in my to-read queue. I chose Kelly Link's recently published (2015) collection called Get in Trouble. The blurb spoke its praise by authors such as Neil Gaiman and Michael Chabon, and it piqued my interest noting this was her first collection for adults in a decade—did I already know this author as a librarian without even realizing it?? (The answer was no.)

Turns out that Get in Trouble was very different from what I expected! I guess I'm one of those people who just assumes a default about most things that can be labelled. For instance, I just assume a book is going to be realistic in story unless obviously indicated otherwise. And initially, Get in Trouble affirmed my assumptions. The collection's opening story, "The Summer People," introduces us to an adolescent named Fran who pretty much takes care of herself. Her father leaves home for undetermined amounts of time for indiscriminate reasons—seeking out a prayer meeting he found online or avoiding some trouble he started while out drinking too much. Seems like a normal, basic, realistic-enough premise. Until we begin to follow Fran's day-to-day as she cares for some mysterious people up in a mysterious house. They're called the "summer people," and their care has been handed down to Fran from her mother. They're rarely seen, but they make things and provide things their caretaker wants. It's like a fairy tale, but you're never certain if it's good magic or dark.

So what I learned quickly from this first story what that Get in Trouble was not going to be based firmly in reality. And to be honest, that scared me off a bit. Because the thing is, though my favorite kinds of stories have always been the ones that felt the most real, the ones to which I can easily relate or understand, I can get behind fantastical worlds if the characters are vivid and developed with real reactions and emotions.

Magical realism, though, this blending the two kinds of worlds, I just cannot seem to get behind. Throughout the following eight stories in this collection, I never knew how to read it—should I focus on the characters? Or is it the unbelievable plot points and details that actually matter the most? I've tried several times, but I always end up finding magical realism to be too distracting for me. That's especially the case here, with short stories, where you have less word-count to get invested in the characters or story, and it's unclear what the "big picture" is trying to say.

I "got" some of the stories more than others. I think "The New Boyfriend" was deliciously creepy enough to make most of my middle schoolers squirm with good-horror-story pleasure. But then "Valley of the Girls," the story of what I think is some Egyptian mystic dystopia, had me so confuzzled by the premise that I could hardly follow the action and dialogue. I believe this will have its audience, but that audience is not me.

Book Tour: Flings

I am so happy that Justin Taylor's newest collection of short stories, Flings, came my way. It has been FOREVER since I read any short stories, and they were a welcome retreat back into books while also considering my now-limited attention span.

My one-time blog collaborator Sal read Taylor's debut short story collection and posted about it on this site. I never read it and thus can't make comparisons between that collection and this one, but Flings certainly feels like a more thorough, second glance at fleeting interactions; Taylor manages to move beyond mere introduction, to provide a great deal of insight into his characters, in the short time we spend with them. That, for me, is exactly the job of a short story—to leave the reader feeling satisfied with brevity, without a novel-long conclusion.

The collection opens with its eponymous story and a quick rundown of the shifting post-college relationships in a group of friends. Percy breaks up with Kat and Kat bemoans to Danny while Danny has a fling with Rachel. And Ellen and Scott are practically married until Scott leaves Ellen, and only Danny can find Rachel to comfort Ellen, and then somehow, years down the road, Danny and Ellen find themselves together, living in Hong Kong, hosting their old friend Rachel in town for a visit.

'Sungold' follows a minimum-wage, organic pizza franchise employee living a cushy life in a crap job with a terrible boss who finds inspiration in the store's most atypical employee. In 'Adon Olam,' a young man is reminded of his childhood friendship with twin brothers years after one of the boys died of cancer. A father considers the life he's given his children and their consequential relationship while at a Phish concert in 'Mike's Song.' And in 'Carol, Alone' a seventy-two year old woman in a Florida retirement community examines the life that brought her here.

I loved this collection because I didn't need to love the characters to understand their conflict. These characters are flawed; there's plenty of deep-seated emotional constraints like selfishness and immaturity, but Taylor's characters are also littered with surface issues like cheating, dishonesty, and excessive drug use. Faults like these are all but guaranteed in Taylor's characters, but it's not the character he's trying to get you, the reader, to sympathize with—it's the situation, and how its a product of these characters, that Taylor illustrates. These stories are by no means concluded—it is a short story, not a novel, after all—but they are wrapped up enough to satisfy the reader while also leaving an aura of uncertainty. We have no idea how these lives will end up, and neither do the individuals living them—and that is the point.

A thoughtful and enjoyable collection.



This post is a stop on the TLC Book Tour of Justin Taylor's Flings: Stories! You can visit the tour page to learn more about the book, its author, and find a list of the other tour stops. If you're intrigued, be sure to check out all the other blogger opinions, continuing through mid-September!

Fiction | Oddities of the Ruralist

I really love the short story. It requires an art and skill completely different than the full novel, and I think George Singleton has got that skill down pat.

His book, The Half-Mammals of Dixie, is the first short story collection I've read in a while. On a whole, I loved parts and didn't love parts.

I thought the first two stories started off strong—on a humorous, biting sort of note. "Show-and-Tell" is about a kid's father who sends him to school with old relics from his former relationship with the teacher, disguised as important artifacts, just to torture the teacher. I mean, that's a pretty humorous concept. 

The second, "Fossils," is about a KKK-member newspaper deliveryman who cuts up the papers to censor anything related to integration. One man has had it, and he and his son drive around leaving flyers for an estate sale at the deliveryman's house to try and get even. Again, a brief comedic piece that made me really chuckle.

It mostly starts with the fourth story, "When Children Count"... when the characters nosedive into something you feel is going to be lifelong hopelessness. Most characters are connected outside of their stories by a local flea market where swindles are part of every transaction and people live by a thread of hope that business will pick up once Floridians head north in respite from Miami's summer heat. "Answers" involves a husband and wife playing 100 questions as part of a mail-order mend-your-marriage kit; "Bank of America" follows a group of men—friends from high school—that just don't seem to really like each other and are all sleeping with one's wife; "Duke Power" introduces a corporate patsy to a flea market character we met back in story number two with disastrous results at a bowling alley; and "Page-a-Day" unwinds one couple's apathetic relationship in one strange day.

I know you don't get the full story in a short story and are sometimes left wanting to know more about the characters. But frankly, many of them just weren't very likable so I didn't want to know more! These were "characters" by every definition of the word—drunks, cynics, screw-ups; I just found it so...hopeless. They all seemed like lost, lonely people whose problems mostly stemmed from their own shortcomings and unwillingness to do anything.

Maybe I'm taking these stories about the South much too personally, but this hopelessness is a version of the South that I don't want to read about and don't want to share with my non-Southern neighbors. Yes, it's a departure from the other Southern stereotypes in literature (race relations and the old-money drawl), but it highlights another Southern stereotype that I find negative—an overwhelming sense of apathy, small-mindedness, stuck wherever you were put.

Kudos to Singleton for branching out in Southern lit. I think he gives these oddities of rural Southern life an honest (and sometimes satirical) look, no matter whether I like it all or not.


I wish I hadn't already returned my copy to the library, because the hardcover version has THE BEST author photo I've ever seen, and I can't find it anywhere online!

Westward Ho!: Sherman Alexie's Modern Indian

When I was in the fifth grade, my teacher made me read a book and write a report on it...that NO ONE ELSE HAD TO DO. The intent of it, I know, was to keep my mind challenged because there was no "Encore" program at my middle school, but the overall significance of this was lost on me as an eleven-year-old; I was just bitter I had to do more work than everyone else. Though I have no idea what the book was called nor what it's plot was, I know it was about the Trail of Tears. And I remember its existence because it sparked in me a curiosity of these cultures that are spoken of so predominantly in terms of the past and not the present.

I've been wanting to read some Sherman Alexie for a while now, since I've been motivated to read about American cultures and lifestyles that are unfamiliar to me. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven is the short story collection that pulled Alexie out of the blue and to the forefront of modern Native American literature. Earning a Hemingway/PEN Award nomination in 1993, The Lone Ranger and Tonto is partially a memoir of Alexie's life growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. The stories are somewhat connected, mostly by character overlaps, and often focusing on a character named Victor who has quite a cynical outlook on life.

That, in fact, is the predominant tone that just drips from Alexie's stories: cynicism. Some of the stories are told from Victor's perspective and some are told about him by others, but no matter the narrator, most are just filled with an overwhelming disenchantment with people and society. A common theme that shows up in many of the stories is alcoholism and how widespread and destructive it is in this tribe. The edition of this book that I read had a preface by Alexie in which he stated (and I'm summarizing by what I remember) that he did not have a motive in writing about the alcoholism; he was not trying to make a statement nor validate a stereotype; he was just writing about what is. I would hate to believe that this is, in fact, the life and mindset of today's Indians, but as I said before, it's a lifestyle unfamiliar to me and one I am trying to learn more about. And though Alexie is perhaps the most well-known modern Indian author, he is but one voice, and his voice alone should not define or generalize a vast group of people.

Alexie's stories are not deeply complex, nor action-filled. They are brief snippets of time or conversation between characters, revealing thoughts and emotions that Alexie has seen and felt. In the first story, "Every Little Hurricane," a nine-year-old Victor witnesses a fight between his uncles on New Year's Eve. We see pieces of a young Victor's history and will be able to understand, as the stories progress and Victor ages, where he is coming from and what he is relating to. "The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Don't Flash Red Anymore" merely contains a conversation between two characters on a young, talented basketball player who succumbed to alcoholism and their hopes that a young, talented artist doesn't follow suit. These stories, no matter how brief, create a history for the reader, so that we will understand how experiences have led to how these people see the world today.

I had a thought while reading this, one that doesn't have much literacy importance but is a discussion point nonetheless: the appropriate term for indigenous peoples of America is still a tricky one to define, depending on who you're talking to. Most of us probably developed the habit of using "Native American" while in grade school, as "Indian" was deemed to have negative stereotypes. But throughout Alexie's book, the only term he uses (when using as a blanket statement and not referring to specific tribes) is "Indian." Now, before reading this, I was still in the grade-school mindset in which "Indian" seemed slightly un-politically correct, but this made me think—think about the history of the term and the environments that have demanded specific language—and the "Native American" I had been so used to suddenly sounded, to me, so...forced. With an evolving language, it's difficult to get an entire population on the same page, and what sounds correct to some may still hold inappropriate connotations to others. So this, and so many more examples of "politically-correct" terms, are still drifting in uncertainty.

Overall, I felt Alexie presented a strong voice through his stories, but he's still only one voice of a population of people that is over-generalized despite carrying vastly different cultures and histories. And to further understand the whole, you need to explore its individual pieces.

World Party: Contemporary Thailand through many sets of eyes

Thailand was August's country of choice for the World Reading Challenge, and I chose some contemporary fiction—Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap.

Sightseeing is a collection of seven short stories that touch on issues like family tension, generational division, and cultural differences. These stories all felt very raw. They all focused on one particular moment of life—an encounter with an foreign tourist, a trip abroad with a parent, a man's experience with the draft, an encounter with a refugee neighbor—but none of these moments, these stories, felt particularly optimistic. The voices in the stories all felt...not defeated, exactly, but perhaps disenchanted. It may have something to do with the perspective of the stories' narrators. Several of the stories were written in the past tense, as if the narrator was reflecting on this past incident or moment. Maybe this is why the voices sound so detached; maybe these are memories the narrators would rather not remember.

It's also worth noting that all of Lapcharoensap's narrators—except the narrator of the final story, "The Cockfighter"—were male, and I wondered why this was. Did culture play a role in that decision or was it purely the whim of the author? Though these stories, as I mentioned, weren't very happy, I found myself sympathetic with all of their narrators. I couldn't quite figure this author out after reading a couple of the stories. Sometimes, when you start a short story collection, you quickly pick up on the author's style and realize that all the stories have similar endings—a happy ending, a bittersweet ending, an unhappy ending. For example, when I read Simon Van Booy's The Secret Lives of People in Love, I quickly learned that all his stories end with some little catch, some little amount of pain that keeps the ending from being completely "happy." Well, Lapcharoensap isn't that easy to categorize. Some stories ended bittersweet, some happy, some poignant, and some just ended without much conclusion. Overall, these stories served more as introductions to characters than conclusions. The endings were mostly open-ended, which makes these characters memorable as you wonder what happened to them.

A good selection for the World Reading Challenge, and a good collection of short stories for readers interested in exploring unfamiliar (or at least, different) cultures.


Only one month left in this year-long World Reading Challenge, and I have to pat myself on the back here for successfully keeping up with it! September's country is India, and I haven't chosen a book yet. Any suggestions?

Review: The many faces of love

The Secret Lives of People in Love—the very title of this book drew me to it. It's the first short story collection of author Simon Van Booy. His stories all have one thing in common, and in case you couldn't figure it out by the title, yes, it's love. He writes about love between friends, between strangers, between couples, between parent and child. And the stories are set all over the place—New York, Paris, Kentucky (random choice, I agree).

I don't read too many story collections; I think the only others I have read lately have been by Jill McCorkle (and you know my love for her). As far as this one goes, I found the stories to be either hit or miss. A couple of them really stuck with me, and some of them I can't even remember now. "As Much Below as Up Above" was the most memorable to me. It's about an ex-serviceman in the Russian Navy who, by the luck of the draw, avoided the tragic accident that took the lives of his crewmen. Another favorite is titled "Where They Hide is a Mystery" and about a boy who finds consolation from a stranger in Central Park after his mother's death. I kept waiting for the happy love story that ends happily ever after about the passionate couple that can't live without each other. But, it never came.

It's not that Van Booy's stories are dark; they just always have a catch—something that causes a little pain and spoils the perfect ending (with the exception of maybe one or two). In this regard, I guess they're very real, and I never felt like the stories were repeating themselves. The author created a lot of unique scenarios. [Though, I caught him using the phrase "saddest-happiest day" in more than one story!] Van Booy writes a lot of those one-liners that beg to be underlined while reading because they're poignant and perfectly describe the emotion. Phrases like:

"...I would randomly take pictures of nothing in particular. How else could you record life as it happens." —Little Birds, p. 2

"It had bent slightly by supporting her. It was crooked with the weight of her love." —Where They Hide is a Mystery, p. 31

"I've lived so long without the pain of language. My life is a letter with no address." — Distant Ships, p. 67

My advice to you: don't rush through these. [I tried not to but when you're stuck indoors avoiding a monsoon of pollen and have only one book to read, it's hard to resist turning pages.] After a while, the poetic language takes a turn towards trite, and I think these stories are intended to be moments beautifully captured, enjoyed individually and over and over again. Take your time and you'll get a lot more out of it.


Review copy provided by publisher.

Review: Crash Diet

I don't what else I can say in an introduction to a Jill McCorkle book. If you want a background on her, check out my other reviews on her works here and here. With that said, I'm just going to dive in. [Bear me with—I don't really know how to review short stories too well].

Short stories are not usually my thing. It's not that I have anything against them; I'd just rather get sucked in to a story that will last more than 20 pages. However, a daily commute on public transportation is perfect for short stories, and I made a commitment to myself to spend time on each individual story. For instance, when I finished one story on the subway ride to work in the morning, I'd wait until the evening commute to start another one instead of immediately moving on to the next. I found this was the perfect way to read a short story collection, because I had the opportunity to mull over each story.

Crash Diet is McCorkle's first collection of stories, originally published in 1992 (she's since published three more, along with five novels). She tells stories of Southern women—some old, some young, some happy, some sad. The situations are relatable without being too generic, the emotions are raw and real, and the voices ooze honesty.

My three favorite stories in this collection—"Gold Mine," "Departures," and "Waiting for Hard Times to End"—I deem absolute perfection. "Gold Mine" tells the story of a young mother of two as her high school sweetheart husband carries on an affair and their roadside motel struggles for business after the newly opened interstate bypasses their small town. "Departures" is about the daily adjustments of a woman recently widowed as she comes to terms with her own emotions while shielding herself from the behaviors of everyone around her. "Waiting for Hard Times to End" was perhaps the most heartbreaking of the collection, as a sixteen-year-old girl waits daily by the mailbox for word from her older sister who was disowned by the family. These stories had such compelling characters and situations that they will stick with me for sure. Do you ever run across a book or author where you feel the need to underline about every line because it's just so poetic and perfect? That's McCorkle to me, particularly in these stories.

Just pick up a book by Jill McCorkle.


Do you like to read short stories? What are some of your favorite stories or collections?

NEW BOOK! Review: Grand subtropical poverty

Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever, published today, is the first collection of stories from twenty-six-year-old writer Justin Taylor, and it's what you'd expect from a writer of his generation. Most of the stories are concerned with family members and relationships, alcohol and drug abuse, breaking away from the norm and yet trying to find roots somewhere. None of the pieces in this collection feel big, nor do any of them truly stand out, but most make for interesting reading.

Like Flannery O'Connor in A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, Taylor here opts to create his titles after found words on sidewalks, graffiti artists' tags, random throwaway lines that would have otherwise gotten lost in the shuffle. The eponymous phrase 'everything is the best thing ever' is spray-painted and 'nobody from the city ever came to clean it up'. 'Estrellas y Rascacielos' is a line from a song in that story. And like O'Connor, Taylor is interested in storytelling mainly of the South, of Jews in the South, and occasionally of characters feeling a bit displaced in New York City.

In 'In My Heart I'm Already Gone', the second story in this collection, and one that almost mimics a Joyce-like epiphany moment, the narrator has found a father figure in his Uncle Danny who one day asks him to kill family's cat. The narrator is sick of being in town, has always dreamed that he is better than what he's become, and believes he is embodying the concept of the title: 'though in my heart I am already gone, am calling my mother on her birthday or sending a Christmas gift to Vicky, I don't know where I'll go or how I'll get there.'

Although the plan to kill the cat works, somewhat vicious in its description and coldness, the unfortunate doesn't end there. Going into his cousin Vicky's room, in an Ian McEwan-like bizarreness of sexuality, he commences smelling her underwear, which stimulates the imagination: 'if she were standing in front of a boy, as Sara stood in front of me last night, he would fall to his knees in worship--how could he not?--and maybe Vicky will not miss just a single pair...' But the problem is that he gets caught by Vicky's mother, his aunt, as he's sniffing the absent crotch.

'Finding Myself', the shortest story in this collection, almost feels like a paean to why Taylor has decided to write, his own tiny manifesto:

I find myself in places I don't expect me, such as outside churches, lurking, peering in their dooryards, or inside my own hollow skull, living a life to which the term hardscrabble might be astutely or ironically applied. Luckily, there are no ironists or astuticians around to subject me to application. It's just me in here--I'm not even wearing socks. . . . I am not a casual observer. Of the few things I do well, casualty is not one of them.

Overall, this début isn't bad, and it's somewhat impressive that someone as young as Taylor has been able to write and publish as much as he has. At the same time, there are few true challenges that seem to be set up by the author: there aren't really any stylistic techniques that jolt the reader into attention, and sometimes the stories feel easy - especially when it comes to Jewish jokes or particular themes and settings. But then again his depiction of New York City, the Alphabet City in 'Whistle Through Your Teeth and Spit', seems wildly accurate while being wildly amusing. So it's a collection that rides several borders. It's like listening to someone reciting an anecdote at a bar. Sometimes you're listening and laughing along; sometimes you just don't feel like paying attention and nod to appease the storyteller; sometimes you can't hear over the sound of the speaker system; sometimes you wonder how you got to that place to begin with.

Review galley generously provided by publisher.

Review: A fictional guide to self-help

Since The New York Times rated Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs as one of the ten best books of 2009, I decided that it was finally time for me to take a look at Ms Moore's work, especially since I've had a copy of her first collection Self-Help beside my bed ever since I saw her speak at the Union Square Barnes & Noble back this past autumn.

Self-Help was Moore's début (1985), most of the stories collected from her MFA thesis at Cornell University. The self-deprecating humour that she's noted for is all there - the laughter in the face of death, the unwillingness to go down without some sort of fight, the unreasonable goals that we have for ourselves and our children and those that we know.

In 'Go Like This', a writer of children's books - William, William Takes a Trip, and More William - finds out that she has cancer and decides that that upcoming Bastille Day (as good a day as any other, though she enjoys the connection to the French Revolution, 'a choice of symbol and expedience') she will commit suicide. Being part of the aesthetic community, she invites her friends over for a 'farewell' drink fest, and they all debate the concept of suicide with age old adages: 'They do not gasp and murmur among themselves. I say I have chosen suicide as the most rational and humane alternative to my cancer, an act not so much of self-sacrifice as of beauty, of sparing.' The story shows how this author's marriage and relationship to her daughter somewhat changes over this time, as everyone is realising the gravity of setting a deadline like this. The final lines (and line break) is wildly powerful and strikingly memorable.

The following story, 'How To Talk To Your Mother (Notes)', is an interesting fragmented tale that progresses backwards from 1982 to 1939 - showing how a woman, in note form, relates to her mother after her death, while she's alive, while this political happening is occurring or this social event is commanding attention. It's written in sharp, quick half-sentences/commands, starting: 'Without her, for years now, murmur at the defrosting refrigerator, "What?" "Huh?" "Shush now," as it creaks, aches, groans, until the final ice block drops from the ceiling of the freezer like something vanquished.' Many of the rest of the stories have this similar structure, this commanding or second-person point of view structure that makes it feel like this fictional guide to self-help.

It's quotes like 'There is silence, grand as Versailles' that give Moore's work a sense of individuality: they ride clichés but are wonderfully and aptly descriptive. They make you laugh, and they make you revel in their apropos-ness. Self-Help has gotten me to buy her new novel and to read start reading it. Though I feel that perhaps Moore might be best - especially her humour - in small doses. But it's all to be seen.

Review: The minor fourth, the major lift

Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall is Booker Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro's latest outing in fiction, a collection of loosely connected short stories that revolve around similar themes: the breaking of a relationship, the art of constructing music, and musicians unable to fit in the world they're currently in. A sense of motion and lingual accent pervades the text in subtle ways, which makes the book feel very cosmopolitan even when the setting is the Malvern Hills.

It seems, however, that the book is mistitled and misleading: there really isn't anything nocturnal about it; it doesn't have the dreamy qualities of Never Let Me Go or even When We Were Orphans, where Ishiguro focuses on narrator's threshold perceptions of reality. It reads more like a flat fugue that unfortunately can't lift itself on its own themes. It's as if each tale is afraid of becoming too bare, too humorous, too sorrowful to allow us really to care about the characters (who are a bit tinny and one-dimensional) and their plights.

'Crooner' reminded me of a This American Life programme, where David Berkeley describes a similar event: where he was invited to sing for a couple about to break up, which is indeed what happens in this tale, set amidst the canals of Venice. 'Nocturne' is a story which re-uses one of the characters in 'Crooner'; the protagonists here are plastic surgery patients who are unable to see one another's faces, who sneak around a hotel and get into mischief. It quite possibly may be the funniest piece of writing this author has ever bestowed on us.

The star stories though are 'Malvern Hills' and 'Cellists', and it's difficult to think which shines more. I think these stand out because they are as close to music and music theory as Ishiguro can possibly get. In 'Malvern Hills', adult musicians help a budding one as he plays his music - like Elgar - on the hills of Malvern. 'Cellists' has a former cellist comment and critique an amateur into professionalism, but has a wonderful and fantastic trick ending that makes you appreciate the critiques even more than before.

Even though no tale here ends cheerfully, there is a sense of optimism that pervades the collection:

"Never be discouraged. He would say, of course, you must go to London and try to form your band. Of course you will be successful. That is what Tilo would say to you. Because that is his way."

   "And what would you say?"

   "I would like to say the same. Because you are young and talented. But I am not so certain. As it is, life will bring you enough disappointments. If on top, you should have such dreams as this. . . . But I should not say these things. I am not a good example to you. Besides, I can see you are much more like Tilo. If disappointments do come, you will carry on still. You will say, just as he does, I am so lucky."

At the very least, this is an interesting but somewhat barely cooked collection of stories of music, something that perhaps a budding artist would produce rather than an established novelist. But the slight experimentation in the shorter form, in the epiphany, is perhaps worth the read.

Review: Wonk

I've been told for quite a while to read George Saunders. And just recently between a 'This American Life' broadcast and a New Yorker podcast, Saunders has infiltrated my system 'aurally'. His intensely brutal sense of humour is something to be admired. His writing isn't necessarily literary as it is conversational. It's like reading as someone speaks.

In Persuasion Nation is a collection of stories which build up to being one long diatribe against advertisements, television, and mass market consumerism. Each is interested in defaming popular culture, a culture that is solely attune to the latest products and individual behaviour. For the most part the tales are touching or laugh out loud funny, but there are moments of dead time or aggrandizement.

'My Flamboyant Grandson' is a humorous tale about a grandfather who takes his theatre-and-Babar-obsessed grandson to the wildly lit world of a futuristic New York City. Along Broadway they experience personalised advertisements (in the future everyone will have advertisements tailored to your brain waves). Unfortunately as the grandfather and grandson are running late, the grandfather physically nudges an advertisement man/Citizen Helper (a title that just is reminiscent of Communism and 1984) and therefore has to go through re-education. 'This, to me, is not America. What America is, to me, is a guy doesn't want to buy, you let him not buy, you respect his not buying. A guy has a crazy notion different from your crazy notion, you pat him on the back and say, Hey pal, nice crazy notion, let's go have a beer. America, to me, should be shouting all the time, a bunch of shouting voices, most of them wrong, some of them nuts, but please, not just one droning glamorous reasonable voice.' It's an amusing statement, even though a bit heavy-handed and dripping with the narrator's own propaganda.

My personal favourite story is 'Adams', where the narrator of this tale walks into his home and sees his neighbour Adams in his kitchen, barely dressed facing his kids' rooms. And with that starts a neighbourly war, beginning with the narrator wonking Adams on the back of the head. This hysterical and biting short story goes into the theories of pre-emptive strikes, protection of children, neighbor gossip, and sick thinking - all of which loses its effect if I try to explain it. 'Adams' may be the shortest story in the collection but it is certainly the most memorable.

Joshua Ferris does a fantastic, dead-on reading of 'Adams' via the New Yorker podcast, which can be found here. Ferris's articulation on the line 'As if he is the one who is right!' acknowledges Ferris's mastery of the story and mastery of reading. In another's hands, that probably would have been slurred. But he gives 'Adams' a wonderful reading and he and Deborah Triesman have an interesting discussion that does open the story to a more 'political' reading.

Saunders also has a new story in a recent New Yorker.

Review: The fiery furnace of fiction

Flannery O'Connor's masterful collection of stories A Good Man Is Hard to Find immediately forces you to understand why the author is regarded as a master of short fiction. From the eponymous first tale any of those that follow it, the reader is aware that he is in good hands, that the author has us on a lead as we watch bromidic characters reveal their festering and inherent nastiness within. Every story is uncannily memorable, as if sui generis of description and form. And it certainly didn't hurt that I read the Brad Gooch biography before attempting this book. Even though I was anticipating plot twists, everything felt anew.

O'Connor's characters bring to mind the concept of Edith Wharton's granite outcroppings detailed in Ethan Frome. I don't want to use the word 'grotesque' here, as every other person who describes O'Connor's work seems to do; but there is something misshapen about these people - not even just physically or mentally. Since all of these stories have a Christian and yet nihilistic them and tone about them, it's only fair to have the characters mimic such sentiments, having hunched backs and wooden legs, obstreperous dialogues and plump names.

In 'A Temple Is a Holy Ghost', O'Connor's descriptions are able to mimic the actions of the scene (much like the finale to 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find', which I won't go into because it is wildly shocking to endure). For example:

[Their mother] asked them why they called each other Temple One and Temple Two and this sent them off into gales of giggles. Finally they managed to explain. Sister Perpetua, the oldest nun at the Sisters of Mercy in Mayville, had given them a lecture on what to do if a young man should--here they laughed so hard they were not able to go on without going back to the beginning--on what to do if a young man should--they put their heads in their laps--on what to do if--they finally managed to shout it out--if he should "behave in an ungentlemanly manner with them in the back of an automobile." Sister Perpetua said they were to say, "Stop sir! I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost!" and that would put an end to it.

'The Artificial Nigger' is a gritty story about a grandfather and grandson, the latter so proud that he was born of the city and is returning for the 'second time' (the first being his birth); but when they get there both realise that they're not as cosmopolitan as they think. And when the boy gets into a bit of trouble, the grandfather, like Peter, denies his grandson.

My particular favourite story was 'The River', which perhaps gets shadowed only because it follows 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find', and it's pretty difficult to turn the page and get interested in a new tale after you read the sharp ending and the violent conclusion to the first story. But 'The River' follows more in the veins of James Joyce's 'Araby'. It's about a young boy who is sent to spend the day with a babysitter as his father is evidently incapable of dealing with his own child and his mother is in the next room bedridden with some terrible ailment. This babysitter is an older woman with children of her own and is obsessed with the Christian religion. She decides that she's taking the boy with her to see this preacher, so that he can be baptised and saved from damnation. Some quite hysterical bits occur, but what makes this so heartwrenching is when the boy returns to the river where the preacher was in order to see if he can see Jesus within. He starts to drink and drown himself in the water, hoping that just a bit of heaven can be inside him. And as the bazaar in 'Araby' destroys the boy's dreams, so does this bit of rolling water.

What I found absolutely fascinating about this book was the fact that identity - especially self-naming - was so fluid. People interchanged their names: one woman decides to be Hulga after she thinks herself too deformed to be named Joy any longer; the young boy in 'The River' deceives his babysitter and claims his name is Bevel, like the preacher they're seeing; men and women are referred to as Mr. This or Mrs. That which kept them always at arm's length. Which seems to contradict the purpose of these stories, which bring you so close to the prejudices and cores of these characters that you feel like you've known them forever.

A deserved classic. One that should be cherished.

Review: Cruciverbalism in stories: a feature on Ben Segal's '78 Stories'

In the introduction of Life: A User's Manual, Georges Perec's narrator writes, 'despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzle-maker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other.'

Ben Segal's 78 Stories: A Crossword Novella is a bit of an anomaly. Perhaps it's in the name. For something entitled 78 Stories one would think that storytelling is of pinnacle importance. But when one sees the layout of said book, one quickly realises that that's not the case.

Because 78 Stories is a giant crossword/cross-story puzzle. Instead of letters within each box there's a little snippet of a story contained. And each of these snippets is connected by an 'across' line/clue and a 'down' line/clue - meaning that the snippet is actually a part of two perhaps similar, perhaps disjointed, perhaps parallel, perhaps non-intersecting stories. In fact the wonderful thing about this 'book' - Can one even call it that? The author seems to think so. - is that you can't pinpoint any character or any idea because the structure inhibits that; it's part of something grander than itself. As if it's resisting reading. Which then makes the puzzle even more irresistible. A vicious cycle. And a very postmodern one, without the inherent snobbery and ego inherent in that labelling.

Following in the footsteps of Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual, a fiction that uses the idea of the standard jigsaw puzzle to piece together the lives of the residents of an apartment block in Paris, and in the veins of Vladimir Nabokov's masterpiece Pale Fire, which constructs and deconstructs a poem through commentary, which is then deconstructed by the reader's inherent belief in the narrator's insanity, Segal's 78 Stories project is attempting a bold project for a first book. In order to create stories that use the same sentences and character names as as this novella needs, the author has to be precise without being too specific, needs to think out everything mathematically before putting any description to paper.

Unfortunately this means that most of the sentences are of the same equation: subject, verb, then the rest of the predicate. Variation would otherwise lock certain boxes (snippets) into being too specific, unable to be pliable and mould itself to the across and down 'clues'. It's a work that continuously has you wondering about the preparation and the revisions that had to go into this book, the countless hours that were spent working and reworking the descriptions so that each across and down snippet fit precisely where it was supposed to.

Sometimes it's the story of a church mouse Carl who has fallen in love with Paul, the man whose house he's invaded. Getting so angry seeing Paul with his girlfriend Carl gnaws into the girlfriend's car tires in order to kill her. And it works. Sometimes it's about a waiter named Paul who watches a crossword puzzle solver die in his café and, after his patron dies, he nonchalantly picks up the puzzle and brings it to the kitchen, perhaps perturbed because he won't be receiving a tip from the dead man. Sometimes it's about Sandra whose repetitive pictures are disapproved by her boyfriend Paul's brother Joseph, which sets Sandra off on a missive writing scheme.

It's not just the fact that these stories are physically attached that brings them together. Uncannily Segal is able to create 180 degree symmetry, where the stories in the upper left corner of the puzzle (about the death of a crossword solver in a café) echo those in the bottom right (about the death of a man after being mauled by a bear). The unrequited love of Carl the church mouse in the upper right is echoed by the painful rejection of Sandra in the bottom left. Etc.

To give a short excerpt of the writing, of the trenchant and biting tone Segal has: in this selection Sandra, the repetitive picture drawer, and Paul, a man who works for a paper obsessed with the Mayan long count which claims the end of the world in 2012, decide to get married:

They agreed to wed on the 16th of December, 2012. That gave them enough time to annul the commitment if the world didn't end on the 21st. It even built in a little extra time in case the Mayans were off by a few hours in their predictions. Neither Paul nor Sandra was even sure they wanted to cancel the marriage in the event that the earth was ok.

In a way, 78 Stories is like watching the process of writing unfold before your eyes. We see names and stories appear and reappear, and it makes the reader wonder whether these are in fact separate stories or intertwining ones, or - more fascinatingly - if they are false starts of each other, if they're the winding routes that the narrator attempted to explore. For that would explain the reuse of characters' names and plot devices, but in slightly modified tones and registers. It's like experiencing a sort of askew déjà vu. Each box builds upon the one above it and the one to its left, and yet remains distinct and alone. And as the aforementioned Perec quote reminds us, all of your feelings, your preoccupations, your amusement brilliantly has all been conceived by the author - which in turn tells us that this is not a project we're embarking on alone. Are we puppets? Or fellow travellers? Either way the author's creativity is looking at us through the puzzle, within the puzzle, watching us unfold the stories as the stories unfold us.

Looking at Segal's writing projects, it appears he's interested in riding the boundary of the short story and the narrative prose poem (some people I guess refer to this as flash fiction, but I think Segal is doing something more than giving us a quick shudder of life). His work is replete with sympathy, humour, and insight, all compacted within a couple hundred words, revealing the inane and ridiculous behaviour of human nature, the subtle nuances of people's desires and actions. It's absolutely fascinating to encounter and experience.

Thanks to publisher for providing a review copy.

Review: Life Isn't This Bad

I have to say, I opened Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth with quite a bit of excitement. Interpreter of Maladies, her first short story collection is perhaps my favorite short story collection of all time (bold, I know). With her second novel, the Namesake, I was frustrated because it seemed like a collection of short stories that was just trying to be a novel. Thus, when I heard she’d produced more stories, albeit longer in length, I was eager to plunge in (though I had to wait for it to hit paperback, as I shun hardcover novels, for better or worse).

First thought – her style of writing hasn’t changed, and it’s a good thing. She has an incredible way of giving every object in her stories some kind of history – a person doesn’t lay their bag on the floor or fill a glass of water without it somehow conveying intimate details of their past – I’ve always admired this about her writing.

The problem? Well, effective as this is, she doesn’t mix it up at all! The entire book, unfolds in almost the exact same patient style, to the point where I was almost longing for short, meaningless spurt of dialogue. Perhaps it’s the Digital Native in me.

Lastly, the thing I really had trouble getting over, is that…well I can’t imagine how terribly her life or the lives of people she loves must have been in order for her to produce this collection of depressing stories. I understand that things don’t always go well, the world doesn’t always turn, but gosh – they don’t always go awfully either! It feels like an odd complaint somehow, but there you are.

A more reasonable complaint perhaps is that…well the flaws in the characters that cause the conflicts appear to always be the same – someone is too traditional and can’t get past it, another character is too unforgiving and unforgetting, a third keeps secrets against all good judgment - then rinse and repeat. I felt like she told the same sad story in six different ways, and by the end, I was happy to get back to sweet, sweet reality.

Review: If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?

I'm generally not a reader of short story collections, and I have mixed feelings about them. On the one hand, I finish a story feeling unsatisfied and wishing to know more about the characters that I got to know so well. On the other hand, I understand short stories, from a literary perspective—how all it takes is several pages to make a point. And generally, I remember short stories long after I read them.

I was most excited to meet Jill McCorkle at BEA, as I have read some of her other novels. She has a unique southern voice, one that does not just speak from broad generalizations and stereotypes about how people are in the South. She describes southerners without mentioning they're southerners. Yet the characters in her newest short story collection, Going Away Shoes, contain a voice that could be any woman, southern or not.

Going Away Shoes sticks to one pretty basic theme throughout all of its eleven stories: women wanting out, or, as the back of the book describes, "women looking love in the face without flinching." From the opening story of a woman trapped as her mother's caretaker to the closing story of a woman's imaginary perfect man, McCorkle describes women—sisters, mothers, wives, divorcees, and singletons—who know what they want and aren't afraid to hide behind their mistakes.

McCorkle seems to have a gift with American short fiction, as stories from this collection have been featured in the Best American Short Stories series and New Stories from the South: the Year's Best. She tackles weighty subjects with wit and poise, creating a perfect balance between comedy and tragedy that will keep the reader entertained. And as a bonus, these stories were the perfect length for my daily commute on public transportation.

Two of the stories can be found online:

"Going Away Shoes"

"Magic Words"

AVAILABLE SEPTEMBER 22, 2009

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

272 pages, Hardcover

ISBN: 978-1-56512-632-9