Hannah, who died in 2010, was the long-time head of the Writing Department at Ole Miss, and his stories are unmistakably Southern—call it Southern Gothic with a twisted sense of honor and decorum that is entirely original. Some stories take place in the tumult of the Civil War and some in the quiet of suburbia, but a peculiar brand of hero is recognizable in all of them. First published in 1978, Airships won the PEN/Malamud award and remains just as fresh and relevant today.
A collection of short stories set in both Nigeria and the United States, the stories are simultaneously dark and funny. The tone is straightforward and matter of fact, but the subject matter can be intense and fantastical. There are no O. Henry twists in the tale here, but no maddening New Yorker vagueness, either. Here is the story; deal with that.
Errantry is Elizabeth Hand’s first short story collection since 2006. If you like fiction that is dark and strange (the subtitle is indeed quite apt), you will love this collection. Hand’s tales are all about characters finding something otherworldly in everyday life. Some stories, like “Winter’s Wife,” possess a numinous quality of a myth retold. Others are unsettling or dream-like in their peculiarity but always beautiful and magical.
These are short-short tales, most only 3-to-4 pages, the right length to read between metro stops. Each is a bracingly original shot of absurdity, pathos, black humor, and soul. (Bonus: It's great on audio, too. The all-star narrators include Ira Glass, Dave Eggers, Nicole Krauss, George Saunders, Michael Chabon, Nathan Englander, and Gary Shteyngart.)
Egan has won the Pulitzer Prize for A Visit From The Goon Squad and is now considered a great modern American novelist. However, if you go back fifteen years or so you’ll find Emerald City, a collection of short stories that showcases her talent and foretells her success. The eleven stories involve themes of shifting identity, beauty, travel, family trauma, and emerging adulthood that occupy many of her novels. If you ever wanted to find out if you like one the best writers currently working, this is a great way to start.
Trained as a psychotherapist, Bloom delves deep into the all of the complications and sorrows of daily life. But she also keenly observes the moments that are wondrous and joyful, making this debut collection a must-read for lovers of short form.
The eight stories in Russell’s second collection feature a series of metamorphoses. In completely realistic settings—the prairie during a blizzard, a sunny Italian tourist trap, a middle school rife with bullies—the stabilities of identity and everyday life suddenly shift, in startling but psychologically apt ways, revealing new facets about the characters and their worlds. The title story follows aging, but immortal, vampires as they disprove the myths of their kind and search, like any elderly couple of means, for the perfect place to retire. In another tale, girls forced into slave labor as silkworms go on strike—spinning cocoons that will free them into new lives. The powerful “The New Veterans” is the account of a returned Iraq-war soldier who’s made himself a living memorial by getting an elaborate tattoo of the site where his friend died in an explosion, a tattoo that tells different stories as the man works through his trauma. Throughout the book Russell’s prose sparkles with telling phrases and vivid descriptions.
These two novellas and five short stories prove that the brilliant Summer in Baden-Baden was no fluke: the posthumously discovered Russian writer Tsypkin wielded a graceful yet muscular and uncompromising prose, and deftly captured the realities of life for Russian Jews in the Soviet Union. Whether describing routine humiliations, violence, or parents watching a child emigrate, Tsypkin combines a Chekhovian ability to bring out the humor and pathos of ordinary situations with a level of detail worthy of Proust. The title novella recounts a family’s experiences of World War II and Soviet repression, but turns the stuff of epic into an intricate miniature. Told in both the first and third person as a man looks back at the boy he was, the narrative recreates courtships and squabbles, illness and train trips, along with bombings, beatings, and evacuations, all taken as equally normal by the young boy. Here and in the other pieces, especially the second novella, “Noratakir,” Tsypkin’s true subject is anti-Semitism and how its targets gradually absorb and internalize it as helplessness and guilt, even as they fight back in their own ways. In a terrifying vision interweaving Noah’s flood, Christ’s crucifixion, and the Nazi death camps, Tsypkin offers a profound meditation on violence, charting the chillingly seamless continuum from normality to nightmare.
Who are we without our memories? From South Africa to China, Wyoming to Lithuania, the disparate stories in Anthony Doerr’s Memory Wall are linked by their ability to capture the pathos of the human condition in stunning prose. In “Village 113,” a rural Chinese village is marked as one of hundreds to be destroyed in a man-made flood of the Yangtze River. The seed-keeper of the village must make the painful choice either to move to the city where her son, a government official instrumental in the village’s destruction, lives disconnected from his past, or stay in the only home she’s ever known and drown. The fifteen-year-old orphaned evangelical narrator of “The River Nemunas” is sent to live with her grandfather in Lithuania, where she struggles to hold onto memories of her mother by tracing the river paths her mother took as a young child. In the collection’s beautiful title story, the lives of three South Africans are irrevocably linked by the legacies of apartheid and the greater arc that draws us together: our humanity borne through our memories.
You may know of Lydia Davis as the acclaimed translator of Proust and other French writers, but she is also an amazing fiction writer. Collected Stories gathers Davis’ seven individual collections, and magnificently showcases her unique talent. While some of the pieces have the characters and plot development of a traditional story, others are samples of a mind meandering as they follow an idea through its logical or absurd implications, and still others are as brief as epigrams, with all the wit and startling aptness that implies. But anything Davis writes is smart and fresh; her work is absolutely compelling. Read one piece, and you have to read more.
Lives of Girls and Womenis pure, vintage Alice Munro. This is one of her earliest books and the only one with the same narrator for every story (hence that tricky “novel” description), which—if you've never read Munro, or if you're wary of short stories—makes this an excellent introduction to one of the greatest living masters.
The Saints And Sinners in Edna O'Brien's latest collection are mostly downtrodden Irish folk caught in an unforgiving world where grace is the exception, not the rule. The narrator in "Madame Cassandra" is desperate for information about what she already knows—that her husband is cheating on her with a girl young enough to be his granddaughter—and seeks out a fortuneteller to deliver the news. When, by chance, the narrator and her husband meet on the train as he returns from his illicit rendezvous, a kernel of hope is sewn into the final paragraphs. In "Inner Cowboy" a mentally disabled man runs up against a greedy real-estate developer, and the unexpected turns and quick pacing intensify the heartbreaking ending. In my favorite of the collection, "Green Georgette," an impoverished young girl and her mother unwillingly provide cover for a wealthy woman's affair with the local doctor, and the girl's mounting rage symbolically explodes into violence. O'Brien's spare yet lyric language hypnotizes.
Each of these ten stories is written with keen attention to the murky depths of interpersonal relationships, and each story dazzles. In "Fraternité," a social climber is reminded of the weight of his ancestry when he meets a poor immigrant and finds they have the same unusual last name. In "Le spectacteur," a man's fallacious belief that he can remain neutral and unaffected in a time of war is shattered when he comes up against the brutality of war itself. The individual ambitions of the mother and daughter in the title story, "Dimanche," become entangled when the pretentious young daughter unknowingly repeats the patterns of her mother's life. Némirovsky's talents as a writer and sharp observer of class and identity shine with each story.
As long as people keep
growing up, getting older,
and falling into and out
of love, Alice Munro will
keep writing about it better
than anybody else. Her
latest story collection traverses
familiar Munrovian
terrain: rural and smalltown
Canada, characters
(mostly women) who are
mild outsiders due to
their higher education
or “scandalous” choices
relating to religion or sex.
And yet everything feels
clarion and fresh. Each
story is built on Munro’s
characteristic deep wells
of feeling and truth. She’s
a master at illuminating
and challenging all of the
relationships and fleeting
moments that make up
this Dear Life (Knopf,
$26.95).
Nearly all the nine stories
in Junot Díaz’s National
Book Award-nominated
collection center on
Yunior, Díaz’s literary
alter ego, a clumsy cheater
and desperate-to-please
lover who burns through
girlfriends the way runners
burn through oxygen.
From Miss Lora—a teacher
at his high school—to the
overly romantic Magda to
the artistic Alma, Yunior
learns This Is How You
Lose Her (Riverhead,
$26.95): by two-timing,
by lying, by being too
Dominican, by not being
Dominican enough.
Yunior picks up tips on
relationships from his
libertine older brother,
Rafa, who adopted the
values of the brothers’
duplicitous, controlling
father. Alas, the women in
Yunior’s world ultimately
prove to need Yunior far
less than he needs them.
Díaz, a recently named
MacArthur genius, deftly
braids socio-economic and
identity issues into each
story’s tiny universe; his
stories mirror our own
jumbled, complex, and
complicated world.
The poet, essayist, and novelist Charles
Baxter started his career in 1984 with an
award-winning collection of short fiction.
Many accomplished books later, Baxter has
chosen twenty-three outstanding stories for
Gryphon (Vintage, $16). The typical Baxter
character falls somewhat short of heroism;
like many of the ordinary, complex figures
in Chekhov’s work (which one of Baxter’s
characters recommends), they’re diligent,
middle-class people, the type who might get
“carefully drunk” a little too early in the day,
or who want to make a difference by, say, helping the homeless, but
whose good intentions backfire. Earnest and compassionate in his
depictions of an uncle adopting his dead brother’s son, or a young
couple testing themselves by driving across a frozen lake, Baxter
also has a delightfully whimsical side. In the title story, more reminiscent
of Lewis Carroll than of Chekhov, a fourth-grade class goes
slightly down the rabbit hole when a substitute teacher shows up
with “substitute facts,” declaring that “sometimes” six-times-eleven
could be sixty-eight.
The impeccable craft of Julian Barnes’s richly
textured collection of short fiction, Pulse (Vintage,
$15), is evident in every detail, including
the organization, of these fourteen pieces. The
bulk of the first half explores various scenarios
of connection and disconnection—a man rummaging
around in the apartment of a woman
he’s dating, a widower returning alone to the
island he and his wife had visited together—interspersed
with the lively dialogues of a dinner
party; life has both its lighthearted and its
grave moments. The book’s second section focuses on various sorts
of loss, but Barnes shows how these deprivations can be opportunities
for deeper understanding, as when a deaf-mute man develops
a special talent for drawing people’s portraits, or a woman so
traumatized by her abusive father that she loses all sense of smell
becomes a talented musician. Barnes is always a keen and compassionate
observer.
