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By Roman Gladstone, on April 2nd, 2013 Author: Bonnie ZoBell
2013, Monkey Puzzle Press Press
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories, Short-Run
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
Just as the term sounds, a “whack-job” is defined in the urban dictionary as: 1. A Person for whom failure is so consistent that they are slowly driven into madness. 2. Someone who partakes in unbelievably odd behavior that a reasonable human would avoid. 3. An extremely erratic or irrational person.
The ten stories in Bonnie ZoBell’s neat little collection are full of such characters, and as the term further suggests, the characters and the tales are darkly comic. Because these are flash pieces – brief narratives that are over before a reader has time to get too emotionally involved – they are not really “tragic” stories, but tragedy hovers over them, menacing as a thundercloud, ZoBell subtly teasing out the ghastly implications with the skill of a gifted storyteller. Often as not, though, there is a redemptive detail at the end and not just imminent doom. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on January 29th, 2013  Author: Laura van den Berg
2012, Origami Zoo Press
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories, Short-Run
Find it on Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
If I’m not careful, my review of Laura van den Berg’s recent collection of short shorts might end up being longer than the book itself. It’s not that I’m normally long-winded. It’s just that the whole thing is only thirty six pages long, and there’s a lot of good stuff in There Will Be No More Good Nights Without Good Nights. I’m tempted to summarize each of these little narrative gems–only one of its nine stories is longer than four pages–but by the time I finished that, you might as well have just read the book.
And you should read the book. Van den Berg’s very short stories are self-contained parables of modern life and love gone stale and the ways people sometimes try to rescue themselves from themselves. Her characters’s efforts run the gamut of realism and fantasy, from a struggling couple who rents a house by a lake for a summer to a family who adopt a couple of cannibals to help out with childcare. Whatever the mode, these stories are astutely observed and precisely composed portraits of life’s disappointments, large and small. …
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By Sean Clark, on January 28th, 2013 Author: Lauren Belski
2012, Crumpled Press
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories, Short-Run
Check out The Crumpled Press‘s site.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
Immediately apparent once you dig into this slim little book of stories is a great sense of pacing. The sentences seem to move with a sort of poetic effluency that is enviable, especially when we’re talking about a short-run debut collection of eleven stories.
I’m a sucker for austere paragraphs like this, from “Everything to Remember”:
Now here is a speck in the multiverse–a day in the Met. Pay what you wish, but we wish you’d pay this. Mankind in a series of hieroglyphs and paint strokes. Pigeons eating the buns of hotdogs on the front stairs.
or this, from the same story:
Japanese calligraphy is like a dance of the hand. I am in love with the sky, it says. I will sing my fingers on silk until it reflects the mysteries of every blade of whatever is wild in this world. I will memorialize, memorialize. memorialize until everything to remember is sacred.
Sentence-level stuff aside, there are some stand out stories here. My favorite, “Reasons to Run,” tells of an underclassman cross-country runner who tells herself she needs to run as far from her life as she can as she takes off for a jog. After a while, her crush pulls up and offers her a ride. They drive around and talk awkwardly before she decides to take off running again. Perhaps it doesn’t sound like much but the narration for this story is its strength, with a complexity of emotion showing through an at-first mundane exchange.
“A Postcard From the Side of the Road” is another great story, with a much more aggressive, almost manic narrator:
God I am so in love with everything, I thought. Even the concrete slabs and abandoned construction sites of New Jersey. Even Allen Ginsberg even though I haven’t got a chance, because, you know, he’s dead and he’s gay.
It’s only a couple pages, and definitely worth your time.
The rest aren’t particularly remarkable for any particular thing they do, but reading all these stories in a row results in a real sense of pleasure. The sentences roll together into a sort of cadence. Pulling that off in a collection, no matter the length, is a task many writers aren’t up to; here’s hoping Belski gets to try her chops at a novel. I’d read it.
Similar Reads: The Outlaw Album (Woodrell), What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (van den Berg)
[A review copy was provided.]
By Charles Rammelkamp, on July 23rd, 2012 Author: Brenda Barrie
2011, Gray Matter
Filed Under: Literary, Chick Lit, Short-Run
Find it on Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
To describe The Rabbi’s Husband as “chick lit” would be both accurate and misleading. Chick lit typically features a female protagonist whose womanhood is central to the plot and addresses issues pertaining to women in contemporary settings – gender equality, balancing motherhood and career, etc. Moreover, the protagonist’s relationships with her family and friends constitute another important theme in the chick lit genre. They are not “romance novels,” even when the relationship with the significant other is the central issue at stake.
These staples of chick lit are present in Barrie’s novel, but the plot also involves deeper questions of self-discovery, identity and authenticity within but not confined to Jewish practice and belief. …
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By Charles Rammelkamp, on March 22nd, 2012 Author: Mark Carp
2011, Xlibris
Filed Under: Literary, Short-Run
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
Written in the serviceable prose-style of a newspaper reporter that keeps the reader turning the pages, Mark Carp’s new novella, Cain, Abel and the Family Cohen, tells the story of the rapid rise and breathtakingly precipitous fall of Jonas Cohen, the youngest child of Rabbi Abraham Cohen. Related largely in the first person by Jonas himself (with a couple of minor but confusing switches in point of view in several places), Carp takes us through the beginning of the recent financial crisis when the housing bubble burst, financial institutions tanked and the economy went to hell. Jonas, a recent college graduate and hotshot financial analyst, has just joined the Frick Group, a New York hedge fund where he had interned for several summers.
A precocious investment analyst, Jonas foresees the downturn in the housing market when he arrives in New York to begin his job (his family is from Baltimore where his father leads a congregation) and notices the vastly overpriced properties. He quickly does his research and advises his boss, A.J. Buckner, about the imminent decline in prices and advises him that the Frick Group should begin “shorting housing indexes,” a maneuver to maximize shareholder profits by betting on the decline in housing prices. A real estate broker by day, Carp writes with authority about this in a concise and enlightening manner while furthering his plot.
Jonas’ predictions and advice pan out and he becomes something of a Wall Street celebrity, interviewed on business talkshow programs and consulted for his insights into the economy. A wunderkind, by his own description. …
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By Roman Gladstone, on March 7th, 2012 Author: Karen Lillis
2012, Spuyten Duyvil Novella Seriess
Filed Under: Literary, Short-Run
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
Karen Lillis’ gem of a novella is written in the form of a diary by an unnamed female over the course of three weeks in December, 2003. It is not a diary in the sense of daily entries that recount the events of the day. In fact, we know almost nothing about her activity during this time except that on December 24 the narrator, who lives in New York City (Brooklyn), boards a train for Washington, DC, presumably to spend the holidays with her family, though nothing’s ever mentioned, and on December 30, the final entry, she is about to board the return train.
Watch the Doors as They Close is a soul-searching exploration of an all-consuming love affair that has recently ended. In fact, three days into the journal, December 14, the narrator writes, “Anselm and I broke up a week ago – a week ago today, in fact. On the phone, after he’d already left New York again to return to his mother’s house in Pennsylvania.”
Indeed, the journal begins, “This is the story of Anselm. The story of Anselm as told to me.” It’s this introspective inquiry that makes the choice of the diary form so compelling. A diary is written for oneself, an attempt to make sense of one’s life. To get a bead on her own life, the narrator must come to terms with her lover, the man with whom she shared a room for the past three months in an often tempestuous affair. …
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By Sean Clark, on January 6th, 2012 Author: Jessie Crockett
2010, Mainly Murder Press
Filed Under: Mystery, Short-Run
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
4 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
2 |
As of late, for what reason I’m not sure, I’ve been enjoying the quick-read gratification of trade mysteries and thrillers.
Although its title isn’t very original, and it won’t be winning any awards, Live Free or Die managed to scratch this newfound itch of mine just fine. At times the book read a bit housewife-y, but ultimately it all added to the charm. I got a Murder She Wrote kind of vibe, if that makes sense. There’s a quaintness to the narrative at work that complements its secluded town setting nicely.
…
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By Sean Clark, on October 26th, 2011 Author: Kelly Link
2011, Jelly Ink (self-published)
Filed Under: Horror, Short Stories, Short-Run.
Get the book.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
This is a short, little volume collecting, as you might have guessed, three zombie stories. Each of these stories, all by Kelly Link and originally published in different books, is good in its own way, but what really makes the collection worth notice is its consistent originality. There aren’t really any shambling corpses, no survivors banding together in a boarded-up house. One of the stories doesn’t even have actual zombies–or any sort of supernatural element–in it. …
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By Sean Clark, on July 29th, 2011 Author: Jess Martin
2011
Filed Under: Memoir, Nonfiction, Short-run
Get a copy from Harvard Book Store
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
A self-published memoir by a twenty-something detailing that horrible, floaty time between college graduation and embarking on some sort of path into adulthood? You can’t get much lower on the list of books I’d expect to like. Despite that, when Jess Martin released her book through the Harvard Bookstore (where we run the paperback versions of our own literary ventures), I supported a local artist* and read it all the same. I’m really glad that I did. It is, by any measure, a very good read.
The plot, much like the point in her life Martin relates, appears pretty directionless at first. She writes about finishing college and returning home to her parents, where she intended to collect herself before stepping out into the real world. But she finds herself stymied and winds up napping on the couch and emailing the occasional resume.
As the book goes on, Open-Eyed Sneeze reveals a lot of gears turning: it’s at once wacky family drama, a coming of age from a second childhood, and a microcosmic metaphor, all speaking to a generation of talented young adults for whom college degrees are inflated and the job market is deflated. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on June 28th, 2011  Author: Richard Goodwin
2011, Seedpod Publishing
Filed Under: Literary, Humor, Short-Run.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
4 |
| Entertainment..... |
3 |
| Depth..... |
2 |
Here’s a pretty good set up for a short story: Wicker, a down-on-his-luck hitchhiker trying to get to Vegas, scores a ride from Edna, a senile retired school teacher looking for the Pacific Ocean. There’s plenty of comic potential in the contrast of characters, but more than that there’s an opportunity to explore the strange ways that people use one another, taking turns lending direction and meaning to each other’s lives, helping and being helped, exploiting and being exploited.
Scattershot is what happens when you stretch that premise into a rambling novel by adding an irrelevant subplot about Edna’s unhappy son, Andrew, and refusing to see her senility as little more than a punch line. She bumbles along, always certain that she’s doing just what she means to be doing, never doubting, never angry, never afraid, ready to follow Wicker wherever he thinks they should go. The problem is, once he loses his bankroll in Vegas, Wicker is just as aimless as she is.
After that, all the aptly named Scattershot has to offer is the impulsive leading the senile with the sad tagging along. …
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