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By Eric Markowsky, on May 14th, 2013  Author: Antonio Tabucchi, translated from the Italian by Tim Parks
2013, Archipelago Books
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
6 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
The good people at Archipelago Books are out with a new Antonio Tabucchi title in English this spring, and while I can’t gush about it the way I did about The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico, I think you might still find The Woman of Porto Pim worth your while.
The title short story is a classic, old-fashioned tale of love, betrayal, and murder set in a small whaling village. The voice of the narrator, an aged tavern singer, is full of longing and mystery. It’s one of the finest short stories I’ve read anywhere in a long time.
The book, on the other hand, is something more curious. It’s a tourist’s love letter to the Azores, a set of remote Atlantic islands considered an autonomous region of Portugal. Fueled by a hybrid of research, personal experience, and imagination, The Woman of Porto Pim offers a brief overview on the whaling regulations governing the islands, a first-person account of a whale hunt, and a few observations on human beings from the point of view of the hunted whales. …
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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 March 22nd, 2013  Author: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
2013, Penguin Books
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
5 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
Back in 2010, I ended my review of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales by saying I expected to start seeing more translations of her work in English “very soon.” So I was pretty excited this past January when I first read about the release of There Once Was a Woman Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories. This is what I’d been waiting for.
Things started out well enough. Translator Anna Summers’s brief introduction reminded me of everything I’d loved about Scary Fairy Tales and set the stage for Petrushevskaya’s particular brand of Love Stories, constrained and distorted by the cramped spaces of communal Soviet living. The first story, “A Murky Fate,” packed so much embarrassment and desperation into just four pages that I felt a little bad about reading it while sitting next to someone on the bus.
As I read further into the collection, though, I started feeling a little disappointed. While these stories are compact and dark, just like I expected, and while there are definitely some stand outs, like “A Murky Fate,” “Two Deities,” and “Hallelujah, Family!”, there’s also a lot of repetition here, a lot of people being unhappy in the same ways and turning to the same outlets with the same results. No one piece struck me as a total let down, but as a collection, Love Stories lacks the endless inventiveness that made Scary Fairy Tales so memorable. …
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By Sean Clark, on February 19th, 2013 Auhor: Karin Tidbeck
2012, Cheeky Frawg Books
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
I picked this book solely because I thought the cover was cool. And as said cover implies, the stories here are varied, but each is dark and a little creepy. Indeed, there’s a permeating weirdness across the collection that Tidbeck sometimes sponges up with her prose and sometimes leaves to soak.
A Swedish author who writes both in her native language and English, Tidbeck’s word choices often have a foreignness about them that do a lot to bring about this feeling of something being askew. I know Murakami doesn’t do his own English translations, but I was reminded of his writing in that way. Like it does for Murakami, these slightly off-key notes give Tidbeck’s story a distinctly magical–and haunting–feel.
It was June, and the flowerbeds were full of giddy insects that every now and then buzzed over to Herr Cederberg to make sure he wasn’t a flower.
The subject matter of the stories is wonderfully weird in its own right. The opening story, “Beatrice,” is about a man who falls in love with an airship. He is unable to buy the particular one he is enamored with, so he build a replicate and keeps it in a hangar as his wife. In need of cash, he takes on a tenant: a young woman who is in love (and in a relationship with) a steam engine. She dies giving birth to a human-machine hybrid daughter, whom the dirigible-loving man raises as his own. When his adopted hybrid child grows a little older, she is able to communicate with Beatrice, who relates that she hates the man, who has, from her point of view, kept her as a rape slave for all these years. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on February 7th, 2013  Author: Anis Shivani
2012, C & R Press
Filed under: Literary, Short Stories
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
3 |
| Entertainment..... |
3 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
My only previous experience with Anis Shivani’s work came from reading a few of the contrarian articles he writes for the Huffington Post. One of these, published about a year ago, proclaims MFA-style creative writing to be an offshoot of therapy, and the fiction produced by workshops to be no more than pale imitations of Carver or Hemingway, or whatever writer a particular teacher might set in front of the class.
That kind of proclamation generally comes from a stunt piece designed to stir up controversy (and hence pageviews), but Shivani hates MFA workshops so genuinely and so strongly that he wrote an entire book about why they’re so bad, 2011′s Against the Workshop. And he’s pretty convincing. While I don’t agree with all of Shivani’s anti-workshop opinions, he makes some good points about the similarity and craftsmanlike tastelessness of so much modern writing.
So I expected this man who hates safe, bland fiction to write stark, bold stories himself. I expected his style to be unique and adventurous, and his stories to surprise me, if not always pleasantly.
I did not expect him to turn out a collection like The Fifth Lash: safe, bland stories that could desperately use a good workshopping. After 300 pages of clunky prose, nearly nonexistent characters, and plots that are both didactic and boring, I would absolutely love to read some imitation Carver, I would pay a stranger good money for craftsmanlike tastelessness. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on February 5th, 2013 This Calvino-esque collection is a C4 Great Read.
 Author: Antonio Tabucchi, translated from the Italian by Tim Parks
2013, Archipelago Books
Filed under: Literary, Short Stories
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
I’d never heard of Antonio Tabucchi before I tore open the wrapping on a copy of The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico this past Christmas. Turns out, he was one of the most celebrated Italian authors of the modern era until his death just this past year. His name stands along side the likes of Primo Levi and Italo Calvino, and for good reason.
The stories in Flying Creatures more than live up to comparison with the works of any other postmodernist masters. Tabucchi renders narratives as light as air in rich, thoughtful prose. These pieces are fabulist, historical, experimental, philosophical.
But rather than laboring the point any further myself, let me share how Tabucchi characterizes the tales collected here (as translated by Tim Park) in his brief introduction to Flying Creatures:
I would have liked to call them Extravaganzas, not so much for their style, as because many of them seem to wander about in a strange outside that has no inside, like drifting splinters, survivors of some whole that never was. Alien to any orbit, I have the impression they navigate in familiar spaces whose geometry nevertheless remains a mystery; let’s say domestic thickets: the interstitial zones of our daily having-to-be, or bumps on the surface of existence.
If that’s enough to make you want to run off and read these stories, I won’t blame you if you stop reading this review right here. If you still need more convincing, then let me tell you about “The Passion of Dom Pedro.” …
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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 Nico Vreeland, on January 25th, 2013 The latest Saunders is a C4 Great Read.
 Author: George Saunders
2013, Random House
Filed under: Literary, Short Stories
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
10 |
I have no idea how George Saunders does it. His stories have some kind of alchemy that I can’t figure out. As many as half rub me the wrong way, but the good ones are exceptional. This collection is no different.
While reading Tenth of December I jotted down notes, as I usually do, trying to come up with an explanation—or at least a theory—for my shifting reactions to George Saunders. After thousands of words’ worth of contradicting notes, I still can’t figure it out.
For certain, some of his old tricks are turning stale. There are two stories (“Escape from Spiderhead” and “My Chivalric Fiasco”) in which characters take satirically named drugs (Docilryde™, KnightLyfe™) administered by a sinister institutional overlord personified by a dumpy middle manager. Both take place in typical Saundersian locales (prison/drug trial facility, amusement park). Both offer decent prose but disappointing endings.
But another quintessentially Saundersian story blew my doors off. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on October 22nd, 2012  Author: Jonathan Lethem
2011, Doubleday
Filed Under: Literary, Nonfiction, Memoir, Short Stories, Sci-Fi
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
In case you missed it last year, Jonathan Lethem’s essay collection, The Ecstasy of Influence, is out in paperback this month. It’s easy to recommend for any fan of Lethem’s work, offering a broad look at his development as a writer and some of his most cherished influences.
But it’s easy to recommend for a few different kinds of readers as well. There’s some interesting music writing in here about Bob Dylan and Rick James, essays about comic books and “Wall Art,” not to mention the Harper’s essay that lends its name to the collection, a surprising meditation on plagarism, copyright, reuse, and creativity. There’s also–and being a fan of Lethem’s fiction, I had not anticipated this–a set of pretty funny stories all featuring Drew Barrymore.
So there’re a lot of reasons you might decide to give this little collection a try, while not forgetting its self-referential structure and its circular conception of itself. Reading the whole thing straight through could be a worthwhile project for the dedicated enthusiast, but cherry picking the bits you find most intriguing is fine too, and probably equally in keeping with the book’s madcap sensibility.
At the very least, you should check out the Harper’s essay, available here or in the heart of this strange survey of the preoccupations of a writer named Jonathan Lethem.
Similar reads: The Disappointment Artist by Jonathan Lethem, Advertisements for Myself by Norman Mailer, and The Gift by Lewis Hyde.
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