|
|
By Sean Clark, on January 12th, 2012 [This collection of spooky short stories is a C4 Great Read.]
Author: John Connolly
2006, Atria Books
Filed Under: Short Stories, Horror
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
5 |
I’ve still never read any of the crime fiction Connolly made his name with, but this is the third supernatural book of his I’ve tackled and loved: it’s just as good as the others. Perhaps as a result of his experience writing thrillers, Connolly has a real knack for building tension. The stories in this collection range from a few pages to over a hundred, but each is expertly paced and crafted. He manages to write stories that are taut and spooky without dipping into cliche or camp. His The Book of Lost Things reminds me of Stephen King at his best, and the mood and creativity of The Gates readily compares to Neil Gaiman’s work. This collection of scary tales marries those styles almost perfectly.
…
Continue reading »
By Sean Clark, on December 16th, 2011 Editor: Joseph Gordon Levitt
2011, hitRECord
Filed Under: Short Stories, Poetry, Graphic Novels
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
| Presentation.. |
9 |
As the name implies, this is a short little book filled with “stories” that are mostly less than a sentence. Each bite-sized story is paired with a drawing: in a way they’re almost like one panel comic strips, but also not at all like that. While some are funny, some manage to plumb some nice depth, especially for their size. It’s not an impossible thing to do. (The not-exactly-true tale of Hemingway’s shortest story–”For sale, baby shoes, never worn.”–comes to mind.) Most importantly this is a collaborative book, curated like a lit mag. The art is varied and interesting, and the range of the stories is pleasantly surprising. And yes, that’s the actor Joseph Gordon Levitt* who runs the show.
Here’s an example:
Tiny Stories is an attractive, if not substantive, little book; a nice thing to have on your shelf, or to leave out on a coffee table. To call it more than a diversion would probably be overdoing things, but it’s a good one. I wrapped up my copy to give as a Christmas present, but then decided to order another for myself. I can see myself quickly flipping through this many times before I’m done with it.
Similar Reads: Our own Eric Markowsky’s collaborative story, “Other Doors, Other Rooms,” over at Camera Obscura was in the same spirit as this.
[This book is currently being advertised on the site--that's how I found it.]
*more or less completely unrelated side-note, he’s the lead in a very smartly written movie titled Brick, a noir-style film set in a high school, which is one of my favorite movies of the last few years.
By Sean Clark, on December 15th, 2011 Author: Bradford Morrow
2011, Pegasus
Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
The Uninnocent is a collection of dark, but not morbid, stories which grow from or end in acts that on the surface seem quite vile: fratricide and murder, incest, animal cruelty, etc. Through skillful characterization and just the right quantity of acerbic humor, Morrow manages to take topics rooted in drear and craft enjoyable stories. Plausibility is not always there, and sometimes the plots work out a bit too conveniently, but as long as realism isn’t what you’re looking for, you’ll come away from this collection quite pleased.
My favorite of Morrow’s techniques is a temporal slight of hand he pulls a few times. He’ll set something up, then subtly skip ahead to an outcome, leaving the reader tantalized. For instance in the space of a page from “Ellie’s Idea,” we learn three things about Eleanor Mead: she is (or at least was) married, then that she is in some sort of moral if not actual trouble, then that “Waking by herself still felt strange.” What she’s fretting over and why a married woman is alone is left for the story to fill in. Similarly, in “The Enigma of Grover’s Mill” the teenage narrator, in talking about a girl he’d been spending time with, mentions kissing her “again” in the first reference to them ever kissing–leaving a big gap for the reader to fill in. This does a wonderful job of helping to characterize this secretive loner of a narrator in particular. …
Continue reading »
By Roman Gladstone, on December 9th, 2011 [This collection of gritty flash fiction is a C4 Great Read.]
Author: Meg Pokrass
Press 53, 2011
Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
10 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
Damn Sure Right is a collection of 88 (by my count) flash fiction pieces in about twice that number of pages. In general, flash fiction is to fiction kind of like what haiku are to poetry: hard to isolate one from all the others and appreciate it on its own. You need to take the collection as a whole since some flash fictions are more successful than others. This is not to say that Meg Pokrass’ collection is “uneven,” but some of the stories are better than the others, and when they’re good, her stories are really good, terrifically comical at the same time that they are poignantly tragic, all in the space of a page or two.
The whole book is compelling; Pokrass keeps you wanting to read more, even when some stories are less satisfying than others, not as cohesive. This is the challenge any collection faces, of course, poetry, short stories, essays, but with flash fictions, each is like a bump in the road, you haven’t invested too much time or commitment to any single one; you can put the book aside at any point and pick it back up again when you want.
Flash fiction partakes of all the classic story elements – a protagonist/narrator, conflict, and usually a sense of resolution, an image of completion, or explanation. Because the form is so compact, lots is left up to the reader to infer, and this can be the truly powerful thing about flash fiction, the way it engages the reader’s imagination, to fill in the blanks, connect the dots. …
Continue reading »
By Sean Clark, on December 2nd, 2011 Author: Ben Loory
2011, Penguin
Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
4 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
I really wanted to like this book. Though to be honest, my expectations were based entirely on the cover art and jacket copy praise-quotes. This collection, Loory relates in his Acknowledgments section, is the product of a writing workshop–perhaps if I’d known that beforehand I would have exercised more pause than I did.
Loory has his moments: he’s got a very nice way with words and is quite adept at turning a clever phrase. He is a very good writer–that is immediately evident upon reading his work. But this book’s marriage to its conceptual premise is its undoing. This is a 200ish page book full of mostly 2-5 page stories which all (all) follow the same structure. …
Continue reading »
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. …
Continue reading »
By Sean Clark, on October 5th, 2011 Author: Daniel Woodrell
2011, Little, Brown and Company
Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary.
Get the book.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
6 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
A pervasive sadness oozes from this collection of semi-linked short stories. This book is a short, grim affair with most of its stories centered around poverty and violence, and most of its characters lacking education or, often, perspective. All this, bolstered by Woodrell’s sharp, atmospheric prose, makes for a very strong collection. …
Continue reading »
By Eric Markowsky, on September 16th, 2011  Author: Stuart Nadler
2011, Regan Arthur Books
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories.
Get the book.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
In seven longer-than-average short stories, Stuart Nadler takes on fathers and sons, lovers and ex-lovers, philandering philanderers, sibling rivalries, and orphans of all ages. These stories are expansive, opening landscapes of regret and redemption all along the Northeast Corridor. Each one boasts moments of hard-earned clarity rendered with a degree of precision that made me pause to admire their craftsmanship, craftsmanship I found all the more impressive for the complexity of the stories themselves.
While Nadler’s prose is simple and direct, the tales he tells tend to distort conventional relationships almost beyond recognition. In one, a girlfriend hires a surrogate temptress to test her boyfriend. In another, a man, his lover, her husband, and their children all add up to something like a family. In other hands, setups like these could easily descend into melodrama; in Nadler’s hands the result is something much less predictable and much more memorable. …
Continue reading »
By Sean Clark, on August 26th, 2011 Author: Steven Millhauser
2011, Knopf
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories.
Get the book.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
10 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
It’s been a few years now since Millhauser’s excellent Dangerous Laughter came out, so I was definitely eager to get my hands on this book and read some new stories by one of my favorite authors. We Others only contains 7 new stories, but this was hardly a let down. The new material is substantive and the 14 selected stories form a very fine compilation of stories I was happy to read again. Both new readers and his fans alike should be satisfied.
Millhauser often builds scenarios in commonplace settings, but somehow manages to give them the aura of a fairytale world (without the fairies). He is a fabulist, and for many of his stories his trick is to impose our real world, or some bastardization of it, upon that skewed reality.
Sometimes, stories like “The Invasion from Outer Space”–in which a yellow space dust made of single-celled organisms blankets the earth but doesn’t seem to cause any harm–pull this off through the first person plural, a tough voice to write in successfully. Through this lens readers can take in the oddity of the broad world before them and compare it with their own. Millhauser doesn’t need to set the stage in these stories, because the stage is his story. “The Next Thing” has a singular narrator but accomplishes a similar type of storytelling. It begins as a Wal-Mart-like megastore, evolves into underground habitations, then an entire corporatized town, and eventually an authoritarian government of a sort. …
Continue reading »
By Sean Clark, on August 11th, 2011 Author: Quim Monzó, translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush.
 2011, Open Letter
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories.
Get the book.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
Postmodernist stories, in their self-referential, pastichey stubbornness tend to appeal only to a select audience. And, sadly, there isn’t all that much of it being written today (a bit of a snake eating its own tail–not sure which follows the other). Sure, there’s glimpses of it in some more mainstream stuff, and a few of the old guard are still around, but it’s few and far between. And a lot of what’s left feels pretty dense and stodgy, and certainly unfriendly to the casual reader. Gone is Donald Barthelme. So imagine my surprise when my brother–not someone I’d peg as a reader of much postmodernism–recommended to me a book of short stories (translated from Catalan) that does a very fine job of delivering short, satisfying, and mostly-accessible stories right out of the postmodernist mold.
My favorite story is one that would appeal to most any reader that has graduated above airport fiction through that relatively minor rite of passage that is reading Kafka. “Gregor” has the best opening line of a story I’ve read this year:
When the beetle emerged from his larval state one morning, he found he had been transformed into a fat boy.
The reference is obvious, and the story goes on to tell an inside out version of “The Metamorphosis.” In another story (“A Hunger and a Thirst for Justice”), Robin Hood steals so much from the rich and delivers so much to the poor that their roles reverse. This story, like others, has its clearly politicized angles. But like any great story of this ilk, it delivers its lesson with a subtle hand, allowing it to merely entertain if that’s all the reader want’s out of it. The opening story “Family Life” is about a family with a tradition of chopping off a ring finger of children aged 9, and explores the degradation of a family tradition left unhonored.
Not all the stories are metafictional or pastiche, ans some are less accessible than others. The surreal “Centripetal Force” I don’t think I can even describe. “Life is So Short” starts with a man and a woman getting into an elevator, and ends with the same man and woman getting into an elevator.
This book is very short and very good. Most of the stories are 5-10 pages. They are smart, funny, and for the most part very easy to read. Even the stories more ethereal in substance can be read an enjoyed by the casual reader. Guadalajara is a great way to spend part of an afternoon if you want some fun-sized fiction to scratch that literary itch.
Similar Reads: Prick Songs & Descants (Coover), Museum of the Weird (Gray), Forty Stories (Barthelme), Collected Fictions (Borges)
|
|
