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By Mike Beeman, on April 26th, 2012
[This outstanding collections of short-stories is a C4 Great Read.]
Author: Eugene Cross
2012, Dzanc Books
Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
If Dzanc books isn’t on your radar as a go-to press for outstanding collections of short stories, it should be. Once a year, for the past three years, a collection by Dzanc has blown me away. Lauran van den Berg’s What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us was my gateway drug, and the way she combined the far-fetched and everyday made the collection one of my favorite books I read in 2010. In 2011, I read Knuckleheads, by Jeff Kass, laughing at the sometimes lunkish characters while shaking my head with recognition. So when I picked up Eugene Cross’s collection, Fires of our Choosing, I knew I was in for something good.
Cross’s book does not disappoint. A combination of Phillip Meyer’s American Rust and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’s Son, Fires maps the lives of working-class men and women who often find themselves a dice-throw away from being down-and-out, problems with love, family, and alcohol complicating perpetual crisis of the wallet and the heart. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on March 23rd, 2012  Author: Simon Van Booy
Harper Perennial, 2009
Filed under: Literary, Short Stories
Find it on Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
Love Begins in Winter appeared on my desk wrapped in silver paper this past Christmas. It wasn’t on my wish list, but I accepted it with all the love that was intended from someone who had a hunch about me and about this book. You might consider my review a belated thank you card for a favorite gift, or else a form of retroactive wishing for what I have already been given.
These are rare and wonderful stories, subtle in tone, ambitious in scope, and Romantic in vision. Each one performs a precise balancing act that spans multiple settings, voices, and perspectives, a feat rendered all the more impressive by a general lack of flash in the writing. Van Booy’s prose is direct and unadorned, as enjoyable to read as it is challenging in its depiction of conflicted emotions.
But perhaps my favorite thing about the writing here is the boldness of it. “Music is only a mystery to people who want it explained,” says Bruno Bonnet, the cellist who narrates the title story. “Music and love are the same.” Van Booy’s characters are prone to lofty speculations like this, and the success of these five stories lies in their ability to support their most challenging observations, persuading readers with precise, evocative detail.
…
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By Robert Cooperman, on February 28th, 2012 [This collection of exemplary short fiction is a C4 Great Read.]
Author: Patrick Michael Finn
2011, Black Lawrence Press
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
10 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
10 |
Patrick Michael Finn’s award-winning second story collection, From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet, depicts the grim industrial nightmare and post-industrial hell of Joliet, Illinois. Think of Dante’s Inferno and Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” shuffled together and you begin to get a picture of just how grim this world is, and how pitilessly Finn depicts it, while still making us care about these characters stuck in their blighted urban Ninth Circle of Hell. But when the damned are stuck in hell together, they do hellish things to each other, and nothing namby-pamby like the infernal and eternal talkers of Sartre’s No Exit. No, these are all-American sinners, who take no prisoners, and have no pity for themselves, so why should they have any for their victims?
So in the course of the opening story, “Smokestack Polka,” a kid whose father has died of a heart attack on his walk home from his job at the Joliet railyards tries to kill the loathsome wife- beating thug who tries to put the moves on his mother, six months after his father’s death, at his cousin Reenie’s wedding. The brick the unnamed narrator on the roof hurls down at Tomczak barely misses its target, and Tomczak takes the incident for an accident and concludes the story with, “But let’s get the hell out of here. This fucking place is falling apart,” which, whether Tomczak realizes it or not, pretty much describes all the lives depicted in this powerful collection. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on February 16th, 2012  [This inventive book is a C4 Great Read.]
Author: Jennifer Egan
2010, Anchor Books, Random House Inc.
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
| Inventiveness.. |
10 |
The Internet probably doesn’t need another glowing review of A Visit from the Goon Squad, but I wanted to write one anyways, more for myself than anything else. Because I do love this book even though parts of it irritated me. Parts of it irritated me deeply, and yet I finished it in just a couple of sittings and then went around recommending it to friends and blathering about the story written as a series of power point slides.
When I first flipped through Goon Squad, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses” caught my eye like a campus streaker: I couldn’t help looking again even though I wasn’t really sure I wanted to. I assumed the power point slides featured in a larger work, but when I realized that they actually comprised their own 75 page story, I prepared for the worst. Here come the gimmicks, I thought.
And I wasn’t wrong about the gimmicks; this book (whether you call it a novel or a collection of linked stories) is full of odd formal tricks and devices. I was just wrong about how well they’d all work in the end. Goon Squad is an ambitious experiment in narrative structure, successful in the extremes of its inventiveness and its willingness to overthrow all of our expectations about time. …
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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.
…
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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. …
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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. …
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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. …
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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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