Posts filed under 'Short Stories'
John Grisham returns to fictional Clanton Mississippi - the setting of his novel, A Time to Kill - in Ford County, his first collection of short stories. Clanton, the county seat, is a town of 10,000 with 51 practicing lawyers and a place where there are more than enough characters to fill these seven stories.
Town residents found in this collection include Sidney, who perfects his blackjack skills and manages to break Clanton’s only casino and Raymond, an inmate who’s been on death row for eleven years. A couple of lawyers are also featured in the book. Mack, a middle aged divorce attorney, receives a miracle phone call and manages to make a substanial amount of money off a long forgotten case while Stanley, a litigator for many years, is kidnapped from a town parking lot and forced to revisit a family from a previous malpractice suit. Other characters include Gilbert, who arrives in Clanton on a mission to expose the mistreatment found in the town’s nursing home and befriend it’s residents and Adrian, the gay son of a prominent town family, who comes home to die.
Even though I don’t usually read short stories, I was curious about this one since it’s written by an author whose novels I’ve enjoyed for years and was included in my recent “don’t miss” list. I’m glad I picked it up. Each of these short stories include the occasional surprises and humor found in Grisham’s novels while describing rural southern life in an entertaining way.
December 12th, 2009
Lesley - Central
This year biographies of three important short story writers came out. Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme appeared in February and Cheever: A Life appeared in March. A Flannery O’Connor biography just appeared as well; unlike Barthelme and John Cheever, however, I had read quite a few of O’Connor’s stories along the way and didn’t feel like she was someone I had to catch up on. But Barthelme and Cheever were two writers I had missed. My own little reviews that follow may seem limited; if you want a broader take, check out the biographies mentioned above; in addition, AO Scott in the New York Times recently made a good case for these three writers, among others, and the short story in general, and To The Best of Our Knowledge recently featured Cheever and Barthelme.
First up was Barthelme’s Sixty Stories. I can imagine him being one of those writers people either love or hate. I think it fits to call his stories postmodern. “The Emerald” is about a talking emerald born of a witch who knows a spell for French fries. In the metafictional “The Balloon” a giant balloon generates a variety of responses from the populace. “Views of My Father Weeping” is a sort of theme-and-variations combined with a mystery. Plots, maybe, aren’t really Barthelme’s thing. Ideas and language are. The book abounds with great lines and sharp observations that, despite their unusual or odd context, somehow get at the fundamentals of the human experience. One of my favorites is the faux-travelogue “Paraguay” which is not about any Paraguay that actually exists. In Barthelme’s Paraguay, “temperature controls activity to a remarkable degree,” and differently for men and women, silence is sold in paper sacks, and everyone has the same fingerprints. A field of red snow “invites contemplation and walking about in,” which I think is something most good stories-and most of Barthelme’s stories-do.
Though roughly contemporary with Barthelme, Cheever’s stories are very different, focusing almost entirely on suburban New Yorkers. Before reading Cheever I had been reading Charles Bukowski and Aimee Bender, so his style seemed a bit stiff. I ambitiously lugged home the thousand-plus pages of the Library of America edition, but then felt daunted. I decided to read just the eight stories mentioned on the dust jacket first. Of those, “Goodbye, My Brother” and “The Swimmer” were both excellent, but, while I think of Barthelme as a kindred spirt, Cheever remained too upper-class, or too East Coast, perhaps, for me to get into any deeper. The Stories of John Cheever (not even seven-hundred pages!) has most, but not all, of the stories in the LOA edition, including the two mentioned here.
May 18th, 2009
Jon - Central Library
The Education of Hopey Glass is the latest published work I’ve seen from Jaime Hernandez and it was one of the more enjoyable works I had the pleasure of reading (and re-reading) in the past year.
Jaime has been drawing comics since the early eighties. He and his brother Gilbert (Beto) have been collaborating on the Love and Rockets comic book pretty much ever since. But they’ve also been working independently of each other. Gilbert’s stories usually center around the citizens of a fictitious central American town called Palomar. While Jaime’s stories usually involve a group living in a Los Angeles area barrio. Two of Jaime’s main characters are Maggie and Hopey. And yes, I kind of fell in love with Maggie all those years ago. So did Hopey. So did Ray.
I never cared too much for Hopey, though. Not just because she’s my rival for Maggie’s affection. (For one thing, she’s a smoker– bleh). Hopey always seemed to be the one who was causing trouble–just for the fun of it. Maggie always seemed to go along, but she was never the instigator. Maybe that’s just faulty memory on my part. A lot of years have gone by and it shows in the characters. These people have all changed with the passage of time– particularly Maggie (that “Snickers diet” really changed her).
In this collection Hopey is now living with another woman, tending bar in the evening, and preparing to start a new job as a teacher’s assistant. She’s also starting to realize that she, and everyone around her, is aging. That doesn’t happen often in comics. Her new job as a teacher’s assistant for a class of kindergarten kids is a change for her, where the teacher she is partnered with keeps insisting that Hopey must talk to the kids, rather than forcing her will upon them.
Ray appears in the stories in the second half of the book, and he’s starting to feel his years too. In contrast to the stories dealing with Hopey, Ray conveys much of his story with a more-or-less internal monologue, sharing his thoughts and feelings with the reader in a way that Hopey never does. His job situation, like Hopey’s, is changing as well, and he too is nervous about taking on the added responsibility. He also becomes involved with Vivian (a woman he refers to as The Frogmouth) a dancer, aspiring actress, all around sexpot, and something of a willing victim to many of the more violent men in her life. It’s a pretty desperate world that she’s skirting the edge of, and Ray seems to be the one decent thing in her life, despite her more-than-occasional demeaning treatment of him. It’s a complicated, disturbing and yet enthralling situation. Oh, and Viv claims that she and Maggie were also lovers.
I should note that the stories/scenes are fairly short bits of narrative– usually about four pages long with six panels per page. There’s also a charming new (secondary?) character called Angel, young enough to still be innocent about lots of things, who appears in some short scenes of her own in the middle of the book. She also appears in stories with Hopey and Ray, too. As does Maggie. But Ray and Hopey never interact with each other in these stories.
Part of what I like so much about this work is the contrast between Hopey and Ray. And the parallels, now that I think about it. Hopey ignores the emotional needs of her live-in lover. Ray is often being verbally emasculated by Vivian. Hopey can’t drive and needs rides from people she eventually seems to alienate. Ray spends his time driving Viv and her friend to acting auditions. Hopey never seems to think, she just acts. Ray spends most of his time agonizing about how to get back with Maggie, but he can’t seem to do anything about it.
Id versus ego.
I also recommend this book it for the art work (and not just because there are pictures of naked women either). I always liked Jaime’s art a little better than his brother’s. It always seemed a little more realistic that Beto’s. Though the work of both brothers is done predominantly in black-and-white (and throughout this volume), Jaime’s lines were always a little straighter, the figures more naturalistic, the facial expressions more evocative.
And there are some striking illustrations included at the back of the book that show some of the characters in some more artistic poses. One is a collection of what appear to be school pictures of Hopey, probably from kindergarten right on up through high school and it’s a fascinating progression of her from a youngster with a toothless smile, to a sullen punk with short, bleached hair and sunglasses, to a demure, lovely photo of her around prom time wearing what appears to be a tuxedo. Ray appears in a more film-noirish setting, with contrasting shadows, while Vivian and her girl friend hover in the background.
You might be wondering, with this being an ongoing series, whether this is a good time for a new reader to dive in to this story. Well, you’ve gotta start somewhere. And we do have most of the Love and Rockets books currently in print on our shelves. Think of it as a soap opera told in panels. And it’s every bit as compelling– in a good way. Like most long-running soap operas, there’s a good reason why the story has been going on as long as it has. These are interesting stories involving people we’ve come to care about.
May 13th, 2009
Dennis - Central
The Berserkers - cold, steel, killing machines. Their one purpose - to wipe out all of humanity. Sounds cheerful doesn’t it? Fred Saberhagen has created the ultimate nightmare of technology gone mad in Berserkers: The Beginning.
Think of Berserkers as a kind of sentient death star, able to replicate and repair themselves. This first book in the series is a collection of loosely connected short stories. I really enjoyed the way that Saberhagen played with this concept. Some of the stories are grim, as you might expect, and others are light, humorous pieces.
I highly recommend this book, but have this question for all of you Saberhagen fans in blogland. My impression is that later novels in the series turned into straight-up military science fiction, how do they compare to this one? Are they worth the read?
May 11th, 2009
Gregg - Sequoya
One of the many joys of the Wisconsin Book Festival is the opportunity to hear authors that even avid readers might not be familiar with. I attended a reading with Tom Perrotta (The Abstinence Teacher, reviewed earlier on MADreads), Elizabeth Strout, and Sarah Shun-Lien Byum (also reviewed earlier on MADreads).
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout has been getting a lot of attention, and is deservedly showing up many of the “best of” 2008 book lists. The teacher in her book is retired, but she still is a person of importance in her small home town in Maine. The stories look at her past, and that of her husband and son. These are complex stories, all linked in some way with characters that reappear, so although these are technically short stories, the book reads more like a novel and there is more time to develop each character.
Strout writes beautifully and each story delves deeply into various life experiences. Olive seems to be a difficult and somewhat opinionated woman, but we also see her humanity and come to understand how she became the person she is. I expected to dislike her but it is not long before she becomes a very sympathtic character, as her strength and flaws are revealed.
Sarah Shun-Lien Byum’s Ms. Beatrice Hempel of the Ms. Hempel Chronicles is a young middle school English teacher, still finding her way in life as an adult and as an authority figure. Although she feels uncertain at times, her students clearly like her and relate to her in ways that they would not with an older more experienced teacher. It would be hard to imagine Olive Kitteridge behaving the same way in a classroom.
These stories are also interconnected, with a collection of individual scenes and vignettes. Some are amusing, for example, Ms. Hempel assigns This Boy’s Life to the 7th graders. Tobias Wolff stole school stationary and wrote letters about himself under teacher’s names in order to get into college. Ms Hempel’s assignment to her students to write about themselves on their school stationary has some interesting results. There is a very poignant last chapter set several years later when Ms. Hempel has a chance encounter with one of her students.
These are two excellent short story collections from two strong writers, and even those who rarely read short stories or don’t usually like them, will find much to admire in these books.
April 20th, 2009
Mary K. - Central
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth is a collection of short stories about Bengali immigrants and their children. It does an excellent job of depicting the blending of both cultures. For the most part, the second generation is assimilated into American culture, but still has many of the values and world views of Bengali parents. For example, it would not be unexpected for a member of this generation to be involved in an arranged marriage.
The lives of the younger generation are quite different from those of their parents. The women in particular have different lives than their mothers; many of whom still dress in saris and cook traditional foods. Education is very important and many of the second generation have advanced degrees from prestigious universities.
These well-written stories focus on many things, but one of the main topics is the lack of communication between the Bengali parents and their children. In the title story for example, a young Bengali woman named Ruma who has just relocated to Washington State, entertains her recently widowed father who is visting from Pennsylvania. They are not able to share any information about their current lives: she is depressed and lonely and he has a relationship with another woman that he doesn’t want her to know about. He is aware that his daughter is depressed, but instead of talking to her about it, he suggest that she return to work as a lawyer, something that might not be practical for her as a young mother.
Unaccustomed Earth fully deserves its place on the numerous lists of best books of 2008. Lahiri’s previous two books are also well worth reading. Interpreter of Maladies is another short story collection, and Namesake is a novel, which has been made into a worthwhile movie.
March 5th, 2009
Mary K. - Central
I LOVE Kelly Link. If I were stranded on a desert island and could bring just one book, her short story collections Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners would be very strong contenders. These two collections feature brilliant stories that bounce between the real and surreal, written in a way that manages to be witty without being smug and poetic without being over-the-top sentimental. When I saw that a new collection of her stories was being published for young adults in Pretty Monsters, her “major label debut”, I was very excited. (Her other works have been published by her own Small Beer Press, where you can download Magic for Beginners for free!) When I finally got the book in my hands, I was a little disappointed to find that many of the stories had been taken from her two previous collections, but the reprints are some of my favorites, and the new stories are equally delightful. The stories that are reprinted in the collection are many of those that feature a young protagonist, making them a perfect introduction to Link for young adult readers in particular, but also for anyone else interested in short stories that are out of the ordinary.
For me, the highlight of the collection is the story “Magic for Beginners”, from the book with the same title. In this story, a teenage boy goes on a quest to save Fox, his favorite character from a renegade TV show that’s randomly broadcast whenever and wherever its anonymous producers decide. His journey with his mother in a very fancy van takes him to various eccentric libraries and his own phone booth, ending at a wedding chapel in Las Vegas that his mother has inherited. Describing the plot doesn’t do the story justice; the breathless, excited narration makes the story so much more than a series of odd happenings. Another favorite is the title story of this collection, “Pretty Monsters,” which interweaves a few different stories about teenage girls with werewolf connections in a pop culture-laden tale of teenage relationships. I really can’t say enough about how fantastic these stories are, and Shaun Tan’s illustrations introducing each story add a lovely touch to an already exquisite book.
January 23rd, 2009
Kylee
Reminiscent of Scheherezade and her need to tell a story in order to live one more night, The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden begins with an orphan with no name or history telling stories to the son of the Sultan. Catherynne Valente has written a very intricate novel portraying another world inhabited by fantastic creatures and races, each with their own culture and traditions.
Using multiple short chapters or vignettes that allow her characters to tell bits and pieces of their own stories Valente spins and intriguing web. It is not until almost the middle of the book that the reader realizes that those bits and pieces are slowly coalescing into a unified picture of a world and its peoples.
Winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award this is a fantasy full of vivid imagery and a wonderful use of language. My only quibble is the author does not tell us enough about the orphan storyteller to make her a character strong enough to carry the reader into the story, and my hope is that the second book The Orphan’s Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice will improve on that aspect. An unusual fantasy that requires some perseverance by the reader but one that rewards with a rich and multi-textured tale.
August 25th, 2008
Liz C. - Alicia Ashman
…it’s a helluva town!
Pet subjects. We all have them. Some people like to read everything they can find about the Founding Fathers. Others can’t get enough science books, or memoirs. For others, novels set in the Wild West is what it’s all about. For me? I’ll read anything you give me about New York City.
New York City is just one pet subject for me among many, but it’s a rewarding one, not only because a lot of novels are set there, but also because so many writers themselves live in New York City and write nonfiction about it. One such example is novelist Colson Whitehead, best known for his titles John Henry Days and The Intuitionist; he’s also written the short prose poetry book The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts.
Those readers looking for a story or guidebook-like information about New York City will not find what they’re looking for in this book. What they will find is beautiful, evocative writing:
“Our streets are calendars containing who we were and who we will be next. We see ourselves in this city every day when we walk down the sidewalk and catch our reflections in store windows, seek ourselves in this city each time we reminisce about what was there fifteen, ten, forty years ago, because all our old places are proof that we were here. One day the city we built will be gone, and when it goes, we go. When the buildings fall, we topple, too.
Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us…” (pp. 9-10.)
I’ve never lived in New York, only visited. But I think I became a little bit of a New Yorker when I read that.
March 31st, 2008
Sarah - Alicia Ashman
There isn’t much to the short stories collected in Three-Ten to Yuma. The title story is over and done in the blink of an eye. I can see that the elements of the story would make for an exciting film, but the screenwriters must have done a great deal of fleshing-out to get this little Western up to its 122-minute running time.
Even the best of the stories in the collection, “Long Night” and “The Captives,” play out in too facile a fashion for my tastes. They’re fast-paced, at least. You could read them on an airplane or while waiting in a noisy station for a train of your own, and they’ll help pass the time without demanding too much of you. I haven’t read Elmore Leonard before, so I’m interested to compare these early stories, all Westerns, all written in the 1950s, with his later, and better-known, crime novels.
January 22nd, 2008
Jon - Central Library
I will make the proclamation: 2007 is the year of Joe Hill. This guy can write!
First up was Heart-Shaped Box, reviewed earlier by Sarah on MADreads. Now we have 20th Century Ghosts, a collection of short stories previously released in Great Britain but only recently available in the states. The original collection was a limited edition of short stories and won several awards, including the British Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award for Best Collection. Which may lead you to believe that these are fantasy or horror stories. They are not necessarily so.
Some of the stories contain fantastical elements. Some are scary. Some are bizarre in an X-Files or Twilight Zone way. All are beautiful and painful to an extent. Many of the stories feature ghosts, death and connections to the afterlife. Many of the “ghosts” are the difficult issues that are a part of life in this era, things that may or not be explained with an easy answer: sensory overload, euthanasia, child abduction, isolation, greed and corruption.
Best New Horror, which may be the scariest story in the collection, is more psychological horror than blood and gore, and leaves the reader hopeful rather than terrorized. Better than Home is a father/son story with a son who may be autistic. Pop Art depicts a friendship between a troubled delinquent and the inflatable boy who requires rescuing during recess. One story takes place during the depression when riding the rails was the norm and stopping at a stranger’s home might result in an unlikely source of goodwill and friendship. Another features a small-town movie theatre haunted by a beautiful girl.
And for dessert, there is a hidden story in the collection. That is an unexpected and welcome gift. You won’t find Scheherazade’s Typewriter listed in the table of contents, but you won’t want to miss this gentle ghost story, either. You won’t want to miss any of these stories. This guy can really write.
December 15th, 2007
Molly - Central
In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash is perhaps better known as A Christmas Story (of “You’ll shoot your eye out!” and “I can’t put my arms down!” fame). I know the hokey-holiday-movie-hating contingent (you know who you are, grinches) might cringe, but I must declare my love of both the flick and the book that inspired it.
Jean Shepherd’s short stories are hilarious. He brings small town freaks and bullies to life in a way that makes me point at the page and holler, “Yes! I knew that guy — what a jerk.”
The familiar Christmas Story plot is just a part of the charming stories in In God We Trust. I dare even the grinches among you to remain scowly in the face of tales such as Grover Dill and the Tasmanian Devil and Flick Offers Me Hard Liquor.
December 10th, 2007
Robin - Pinney
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