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By Sean Clark, on October 5th, 2011 Author: Daniel Woodrell
2011, Little, Brown and Company
Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary.
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| 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. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on September 16th, 2011  Author: Stuart Nadler
2011, Regan Arthur Books
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories.
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| 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. …
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By Sean Clark, on August 26th, 2011 Author: Steven Millhauser
2011, Knopf
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories.
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| 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. …
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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.
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| 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)
By Charles Rammelkamp, on June 15th, 2011 Editors: Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney
Rose Metal Press, 2011
Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary.
Get a copy at Powell’s.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
They Could No Longer Contain Themselves is a collection of five chapbooks – seventy-three flash fiction pieces – in about 240 pages; each story packs a swift punch, some more effective than others. Written by five different authors – John Jodzio, Mary Miller, Elizabeth J. Colen, Tim Jones-Yelvington and Sean Lovelace – these are five distinct voices, or styles, contained between two covers. But as editors Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney note in their excellent preface, the stories in these five chapbooks are barely contained, bursting out beyond the confines of their plots and truly exemplifying the possibilities of the genre, which often eschews plot and character in favor of experience itself.
The book’s title comes from a line in the story “Aesthete,” from Mary Miller’s collection, Paper and Tassels. The title refers to a boy the narrator, a young girl, suspects is gay, even as he runs his hand up her skirt. Beads of water from a leaky ceiling swell “until they could no longer contain themselves,” and we wonder who is reaching that point. The boy? The girl? Both? …
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By Eric Markowsky, on May 25th, 2011  Author: Jim Shepard
2011, Knopf
Filed Under: Short Stories, Historical, Horror, Literary.
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
You Think That’s Bad offers 11 stories inspired by a diverse array of subjects, from flood control and avalanche research to World War II and the Japanese film industry. Each one is thoroughly researched, tightly written, and full of compelling, hopeless characters. As a collection, though, You Think That’s Bad strikes the same emotional chord a little too often to make the whole something greater than its best parts.
One story is about a Black World operative who can’t talk to his wife. One is about a Dutch hydraulics engineer who can’t talk to his wife. There’s a particle physicist who can’t talk to his wife; there’s a Japanese special effects designer who can’t talk to his wife; there’s a Polish mountaineer who does a better job talking to his wife, but not nearly good enough to save either of them from himself. It’s tragic watching these obsessed men ruin their lives one after the other, but some things start to feel repetitive. …
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By Mike Beeman, on May 24th, 2011
 Author: Rachel B. Glaser
2010, Publishing Genius Press
Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary.
Get a copy at Powell’s.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
In Pee on Water, Rachel Glaser’s debut short story collection, you will find updated fairy tales, post-modern love stories, surreal dips into a mix of real and imagined history, and narratives sketched from the point of view of the book you are holding—and all of this in one ten page story, “The Magic Umbrella,” an endlessly inventive piece of writing in which Glaser uses a series of internal “About the Authors,” to allow each section build on the previous and take these fantastic turns.
“The Magic Umbrella” leads Glasers’ collection, and is an excellent introduction to her mercurial stories. Over the course of 143 pages the author covers a wide range of subjects: A lonely youth becomes deeply engrossed in, and then beholden to, an interactive video game about John Lennon’s life in “The Jon Lennin Xperience.” “The Kid” starts as a burn-out love story, but quickly becomes a surreal nightmare. My personal favorite, one of the most touching and, oddly enough considering the subject, conventional stories in terms of form is “The Monkey Handler,” a tale chronicling the misadventures of a group of astronauts and their amateur crew whose star-crossed love affairs lead to their abandonment in space.
The title story, “Pee on Water,” a droll history of the world, suggests that nothing has really changed but what is contained in the story’s title:
This is the nice time of early men and monkeys, before cigarette butts cozied fat into the grass. No plastics, no prayers. Wood isn’t sliced into slats, it’s still living it up in trees. The rain is surprising, usual. Men and monkeys leave their lives with their bodies. Early men paint, cry, stare into fire meditatively. Pee on grass. Pee on dirt. Wear furs, have babies, catch dogs. Fall in love with dogs. Pause at oceans and their rambling edges. Sticks complicate grass. Grass complicates sand. The ground and every thousand thing on top of it. Curves and lumps. Uneven clouds. But click the clock radio through am to pm, spin the equal sphere like a sonic hedgehog. The leaves live the leaves fall, the leaves live the leaves die.
This story, so far removed in psychic distance, is at an extreme pole of Glasers’ style: hyper self-conscious, dripping with irony, full of subtle and not-so-subtle pop-culture references. At times this combination can pull the reader from the story, but far more often Glaser manages to implicate the reader in her imaginative tales instead. A recent nod as one of the top twenty fiction titles of last year by The Believer‘s readers (alongside such venerable heavyweights as Martin Amis, Jennifer Egan, and some guy named Franzen) speaks to this success. The result is a collection that is inventive and original, touching as well as hilarious, and surprising in all the best ways.
By Sean Clark, on May 6th, 2011 Author: E. Thomas Finan
2010, Fieldnor Press
Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary, Short-Run
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
6 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
The Other Side is the debut collection by the young E. Thomas Finan. In ten relatively short stories, Finan displays a fine range of subject matter, and a clear aptitude with words. The first two stories, “Lucy di Sartoria” and “Motley Black” are decent examples of contemporary realist fiction, with dynamic characters standing before plausible emotional crossroads. Others, like “Billy Stevens is 28,” feel a bit lacking in maturity.
Finan’s staccato syntax and flair for snappy details are his strong suit. Take this one:
That cigarette-stained laughter, again.
There were plenty of catchy lines like this, which I found myself underlining, and many that don’t stand out on their own but build together to form a very readable narrative voice. But there are also occasional outliers, lines that made me cringe just a little: …
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By Sean Clark, on April 7th, 2011 Author: Joyce Carol Oates
 2011, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories, Thriller
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
Joyce Carol Oates’s latest collection treats its subtitle’s promise in very interesting ways. For me the phrase “tales of mystery and suspense” conjures stalker stories, Poe-style tales of confinement, or even panic-ridden accounts of murderers cracking under fear of capture. I assumed a pinion of physical threat would complete the gears for each of these stories. And indeed, it is a real theme in the book. Right off the bat we see it: in the titular story, a woman writes a former lover with a request for his heart for transplant upon his death (when that may come is the underlying threat). The writing in her correspondence navigates the line of menace delicately. But for much of the book, physical threat is not really the suspense at hand; the writing carries similar nuance throughout. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on March 17th, 2011 [This hilarious collection of surreal stories is a C4 Great Read.]
 Author: Patrick Somerville
2010, Featherproof Books
Filed under: Literary, Humor, Sci-Fi, Short Stories
Get a copy at Powell’s.
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
10 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
I know the pain of reading a book that’s been called “funny” because it offers nothing else, and I know how genuine comedy needs nothing else to captivate. And so I take it very seriously when I say that Patrick Somerville’s story collection, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, is hilarious.
And while there’s a lot more to this collection, the nature and tone and quality of its humor is what makes it great. Unlike the straining, jesterly comedy of “comic novels” like The Sheriff of Yrnameer, Somerville’s humor doesn’t compromise the writing or the story, but only ever adds to it. …
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