Author: Thom Jones

1995, Little, Brown, & Company

Filed under: Literary, Short Stories

I loved Thom Jones’s debut collection, The Pugilist at Rest, so I was thrilled to find parallels to his previous work everywhere when I started Cold Snap. His protagonists are still hyped up on life and drugs, desperate, terminally ill, caught in extreme situations or else throwing themselves into disaster. His prose still manages the precision of surgery with the pacing of a car chase. Ad Magic, the amnesiac hero of one of my favorite stories from the previous collection, even makes an appearance.

So if you liked Pugilist at Rest, then there’s a lot to like in Cold Snap. Unfortunately, there’s not much else. For me, these stories were a confirmation of Jones’s talent and a strange disappointment. No single story disappointed me completely, but neither did any deliver with the same force as the best stories in Pugilist, and most of the stories here offered only echoes of Jones’s earlier work. …
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Author: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers

2009, Penguin Books

Filed Under: Literary, Fantasy, Horror, Short Stories

Here’s one thing not to do with these stories. Don’t leave them on your bedside table so you can read one each night before going to sleep. They aren’t the scariest stories you’ll ever read, but they are warped little tales that will send your dreams off in strange directions over barren, unmarked terrain.

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is one of the best-known Russian authors writing today, and this collection offers English-speaking readers an introduction to the supernatural side of her work. These stories range from classic ghost stories to apocalyptic allegories, with a few lighter touches in between. They all bring the straightforward manner of a fairy tale to a contemporary Russian landscape, where there are asylums and hospitals instead of dungeons, and where destiny can take the form of true love or mandatory government service. …
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[This collection of short stories is a C4 Great Read.]

Author: Bruno Schulz

1977, Viking Penguin

Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories

Originally written for an audience of one, Bruno Schulz composed the first draft of The Street of Crocodiles in a series of letters to a friend. After editing, publishing, republishing, and translation, these stories still retain the intimacy of personal correspondence. Each one invites you into the narrator’s life, his city, home, and family, and insists that you stay, not just for supper, not just for the night, but as a guest in one of the extra rooms at the top of the stairs.

It’s neither a novel nor a conventional story collection. While characters and conflicts reappear throughout, there’s no continuous narrative arc, and though each piece has its own peculiar preoccupations, the setting and the narrator remain constant from one to the next. It reads like both a childhood memoir and a work of mythology, at once willfully domestic and larger than life. …
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[This collection of short stories is a C4 Great Read.]

Author: Tom Rachman

2010, The Dial Press

Filed under: Literary, Short Stories

The Imperfectionists is yet another book miscategorized by its own cover. This is not a novel, not by a long shot, but the fact that it’s not a novel is one of the reasons it works so well.

This is a collection of stories. They are, very loosely, linked: they all feature people connected in some way to a nameless English-language international newspaper based in Rome. Some characters appear in multiple stories, a few in nearly all of them. But instead of a single narrative arc, The Imperfectionists chronicles the interior lives and private problems of each of its varied characters, and it’s that variety and interiority (along with, of course, excellent writing) that makes this collection so strong. …
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[This novel is a C4 Great Read.]

Author: J.D. Salinger

1961, Little, Brown & Company

Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories

I suspect many of you have already read this book, either because it was assigned in school way back when, or because gobbling up J.D. Salinger is an American teen rite of passage. I, it shames me a little to admit, never did. But now I have. Good on me.

This is going to be a real brief review, and not even much of a review. More of like a signpost point to why you should read this. It’s short, it’s funny, and it’s superbly written. I guess that’s about the sum of it. I’ll go on though.

Franny and Zooey is comprised two short stories (originally published in the New Yorker—in fact, there’s a bunch of good Salinger in their archives, like the novella, Hapworth 16, 1924, unpublished outside the magazine) attached together. As a whole, it makes up about 100 pages and 5 scenes. …
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Author: Ron Rash

Ecco, 2010

Filed under: Literary, Short Stories

Ron Rash excels at creating haunting, affecting portraits of emotion. They don’t often twist, and they don’t often surprise, but at their best (like his most recent novel, Serena, which I loved), they can be darkly riveting.

The short stories in Burning Bright—and they are quite short—largely rely on their premises. If the emotional territory he stakes out is rich enough to yield pay dirt in only a dozen or so pages, these too can be as compelling as Serena.

Rash manages that feat in only a third of the stories here. The rest of the time, unfortunately, there’s simply something missing.

…
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Author: Wells Tower

Picador, 2010

Filed under: Literary, Short Stories

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned grabbed me by the nuts in the very first paragraph of the first story, “Brown Coast,” as Bob Munroe wakes up covered in Saltines:

Cracker bits were all over him—under his bare chest, stuck in the sweaty creases of his elbows and neck, and the biggest and worst of them he could feel lodged deep into his buttock crack, like a flint arrowhead somebody had shot in there.

To escape from a busted marriage and a lost job, Munroe holes up in his uncle’s beach house in an unnamed, rinky-dink town. Here he accidentally and grudgingly makes friends with Derrick, the local vet (“Gotta take a ride over the bridge,” he said. “Need to go pull something out of a horse’s pussy”). Derrick’s wife, Claire, is so fetching that her beauty “made [Bob’s] throat itch,” and Tower makes it clear that Bob and Claire will eventually exchange fluids.

Meanwhile, back at home, Bob’s wife is spending an awful lot of time with Bob’s uncle, the man who suggested the beach house for Bob’s getaway. …
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Edited by John Joseph Adams

2008, Nightshade Books

Filed Under Sci-Fi, Short Stories

It’s tough to review an anthology, seeing as A.) there are myriad voices and styles in a single book B.) the selection are chosen because they are exempletive of something and presumably so because they are good or the best at whatever they were selected for C.) despite this, some entries are inevitably better than others, and it’s hard to score the whole thing without undercutting some and giving others too much credit. So, with that said, my score for this is an attempt to quantify my overall impression of this book, so take from it what you will.

I don’t read too much of this kind of sci-fi, or many sci-fi short stories at all for that matter, but when I saw the roster of authors contributing to this collection I had to pick it up. It’s got writers from all sorts of genres, from sci-fi (Paolo Bacigalupi) and fantasy (George R. R. Martin) to horror (Stephen King) to whatever genre you consider Jonathan Lethem implicated in. …
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Edited by Dennis Lehane

Akashic Books, 2009

Filed Under: Thrillers, Short Stories, Mystery

The Boston Noir collection marks our fair city’s induction in the roving city-themed noir series, “Book Noir,” from Akashic Books. Already the series has seen collections from Brooklyn, San Francisco, Baltimore, and Phoenix, among others. Dennis Lehane is an obvious choice as editor -I’d be be hard-pressed to come up with a close second in terms of Boston crime novelists. He proves a smart choice, as well, and has put together a collection of noir stories as he defines them: working-class tragedies. In this collection, Lehane explores not only crime, or, as he calls it “skuzzy people doing skuzzy things to other skuzzy people,” but explores what the Boston means to the people who live in, and more often just-outside, New England’s second-place city. …
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Put aside everything you’re doing and read The Knife Thrower and Other Stories, by Steven Millhauser, immediately. (See the other entries in this series here.)

For the record,  my favorite, favorite book ever and a book I truly think any reader should drop everything for is Lolita. But I’ve harped on it on this site again and again already. I read a lot of books, though, and there are a ton I think every reader should read. Steven Millhauser has written a number of these and The Knife Thrower and Other Stories is my favorite of his. Read it now.

Millhauser was one of a handful of excellent professors I had in college, so I’m a little biased. If you’re reading this site, I’d be a little surprised you’ve never heard of him. But if somehow you haven’t read him, you should. He is undeniably one of the most precise and imaginative writers writing today. He is a fabulist and a natural storyteller with a knack for writing stories that are at once cerebral and accessible. …
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