Chamber Four

Author: Jim Shepard

2007, Knopf

Best ebook deal: Barnes & Noble

Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories

Throughout this collection, Jim Shepard demonstrates his expertise in writing varied stories, playing with voice and mood, and delivering an array of diverse tales. Whether you approach the stories in the presented order or pick at them like a buffet, the first thing you’ll notice when beginning the second story you read is how different the voice is from the previous story.

Sometimes when writers work in this mode the authorial voice becomes washy or, worse, lost amid the competing characters. Other times when collections rely on a diversity of voices, the strength of a collection can be diminished by a few weaker entries in an otherwise competent assortment of character studies.

Thankfully, though he employs a wide range of characters, eras, and voices, neither of these are the case in Like You’d Understand, Anyway. …
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Author: Maile Meloy

2009, Riverhead

Best ebook deal: Sony

Filed under: Short Stories, Literary

Meloy’s oddly styled first novel, Liars and Saints, consisted almost entirely of plot summary, something verboten by the old writers’ group adage about showing and not telling. Liars and Saints covered decades in just a few hundred pages, and rarely paused long enough to let a full scene play out.

Both Ways has the vestiges of that technique, but Meloy shows signs of moving toward a more traditional dose of dramatization to go with her narration. Still, Both Ways has a broad, could-go-anywhere feel to it, and Meloy keeps her penchant for packing years into paragraphs.

As a reader, this means that you’re never quite sure, for better or for worse, what you’re reading about. The story that begins with a man’s parents dying might never mention them again, instead focusing on his crappy construction job years later.

In this collection, the strongest stories are those that feature more scene than summary, but Meloy’s tendency and ability to take stories on long, snaking left turns gives them a wild-card feel and a persistent, compelling undercurrent of danger.

However, Meloy hasn’t quite mastered this mix of dramatization and narration―sometimes she plays out scenes that have no real weight, and she often stops short of pushing her characters into the pit of drama they can so clearly sense.

Ultimately, Both Ways is connective tissue in the muscular body of work of a very good writer. She’s taking the next step in her career, and while she’s not there yet, she’s definitely an author to keep an eye on.

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This book has been chosen as a Great Read.

Author: Donald Ray Pollock

Doubleday, 2008

Best ebook deal: Public library

The current Wikipedia entry for Knockemstiff, Ohio labels the community a “ghost town.” While its handful of corporeal residents would dispute the tag, Donald Ray Pollock’s short story collection won’t make you want to drop by and discuss with them the vagaries of collaborative reference guides—even if the writer does claim that his depraved, nightmarish characters are not based on real Knockemstiffers.

Pollock grew up in Knockemstiff, a loose collection of houses and trailers sixty miles south of Columbus, and worked for thirty-two years in a nearby paper mill, spending much of his free time in and out of marriages and rehab centers. In his mid-forties, he earned a Bachelor’s in English, enrolled in (“The”) Ohio State University’s MFA program, and began writing about characters who struggle with issues that Pollock himself admits to having shared addictions, go-nowhere jobs, a sense of rural entrapment, and constant imbroglios with the opposite sex.

Pollock’s grotesque drunks and brawlers, speed freaks and dealers, sexual deviants and rape victims (the animate ones, at least) stumble bleary-eyed through the “holler” that they just cannot escape, carrying with them heavy regrets and bleak futures. “Sometimes it scares me to think I will probably spend the rest of my days wishing I’d blown a rabbit’s guts clear across Harry Frey’s orchard when I was six years old,” one character reflects, while another, looking ahead, thinks, “I’m beginning to believe that anything I do to extend my life is just going to be outweighed by the agony of living it.”

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Author: Thomas McGuane

Knopf, 2006

Best ebook deal: Sony eBook Store (ugh)

It’s difficult to discuss as a coherent whole any book of short stories, but especially a collection like Gallatin Canyon, whose most notable quality is a vast range between the register, tone, and language of each story.

McGuane fearlessly builds characters of various genders, races, education levels, professions, sensibilities, and dispositions. He strides as confidently into the life of a grumpy philandering retired lawyer as into that of a prostitute who makes extra money by rolling on her johns.

My one complaint is that McGuane seems to focus on the variety of his characters to the detriment of the trips he takes them on. He spends a lot of words setting scenes, and proving that he knows his stuff when he talks about sailing or herding cattle. He spends so much time building the lives of his characters that he rarely has enough time left to push them finally into trouble.

His stories are ultimately admirable, but never equally as entertaining. …
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Author: Yoko Ogawa, Translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder

Picador, 2008

Best eBook Deal: MobiPocket

A short collection of three novellas, The Diving Pool presents some excellent fiction, although it never strays to far from the New Yorker mold. All three stories have an eerie and haunting quality to them that adds a palpable atmosphere to excellent character studies. …
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