Feb

14

Short Stories: Where’s The Love?

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

February 14, 2007 |

Where’s the love for the modern short story? For most fiction writers the short story seems to be a way to get their literary foot in the door, publishing in quarterly magazines called [Name of state/city/college/region] Review until they have enough to make a collection, and then they settle into a career of writing novels. Even when the short stories are really good, better even than some of the novels, they disappear into obscurity.

The beauty of the short story is that it’s, well, short, and there are good ones out there, hiding away unnoticed. Having a rough day at work? Take a lunch break and immerse yourself in a short story. Here are a few short story collections that I hope you’ll love, or at least spend a little time with:

Steve Almond’s perspective on relationships is sad, funny, poignant, and almost as insane as real life. His first book of stories, My Life In Heavy Metal (Grove Press, 2003), can be summed up in one word: sex. Make that two words: sex and stupidity, because sex often does make us act stupidly. Sex is still prevalent in Almond’s follow-up collection The Evil B.B. Chow (Algonquin Books, 2005), but the stories are more varied (including a short story about Abraham Lincoln). Almond is a very diverse and prolific writer. He has a regular blog on his web site, and he has a nonfiction memoir about his obsession with candy called, appropriately, Candyfreak (Algonquin Books, 2004). From the first paragraph you know that Almond is right to call himself a candyfreak. More recently he’s written, with Julianna Baggott, Which Brings Me To You: A Novel In Confessions (April 2006).

A. Manette Ansay’s Read This And Tell Me What It Says (University of Massachusetts Press, 1995) is a powerful and unforgettable collection of short stories. Ansay’s characters deal with crises of faith, of aging, of expectations, marriages dancing around disintegration. Perspectives shift from mother to daughter to son to mother-in-law. Stories seen through the eyes of different characters made her first novel Vinegar Hill (Viking, 1994) less like a novel and more like interconnected short stories. Ansay has abandoned the short story for powerful novels like River Angel (William Morrow, 1998), but that doesn’t mean her short stories should be forgotten or overlooked.

For stories that range from the historical to the fantastic, Jim Shepherd’s Love And Hydrogen (Vintage, 2004) includes stories from his previous collection Batting Against Castro (Knopf, 1996) and new stories. The title story is about homosexual lovers who are also engineers on the Hindenburg, two men living doubly dangerous lives, while The Creature From The Black Lagoon is a tribute to the original movie, and is told from the creature’s perspective, similar John Gardner’s Grendel. From the Antarctic to the soccer field to John Ashcroft to an animal shelter, Shepherd’s characters crisscross the globe, and the emotional spectrum. Shepherd has also written numerous novels, including the strange Lights Out In The Reptile House (Norton, 1990, out of print), and co-edited, with Ron Hansen, the short story anthology You’ve Got To Read This: Contemporary American Writers Introduce Stories That Held Them In Awe (Norton, 1994).

White Walls: The Collected Stories by Tatyana Tolstaya (translated by Jamey Gambrell), not yet published (its due date is April), brings together short stories from Tolstaya’s two previous collections, On The Golden Porch (Knopf, 1989, out of print) and Sleepwalker In A Fog (Knopf, 1992). Tolstaya was called a “luminous voice” by Joseph Brodsky, and even in translation her prose is beautiful. I was originally captivated by the story Night, which I read in an anthology. Her stories are all told in a wonderful, highly synesthetic style–ice cream is “spiky” in people’s mouths, lungs are “red roses”. Her characters range from a developmentally disabled man to a translator to a poet. Her work in English translation also includes the novel The Slynx (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), and Pushkin’s Children: Writings On Russia And Russians (Houghton Mifflin, 2003). And if her name sounds a little familiar, it’s because Tolstaya is the great grandniece of Leo Tolstoy. Tolstaya’s own family history, as well as her writing, are a link between the past and the present.


Comments

3 Comments so far

  1. Little Miss Know it All on February 14, 2007 8:36 am

    Maeve Binchy wrote a couple of books as a collection of short stories…wonderful work about different characters and their lives in rural Ireland.

  2. Christopher Waldrop on February 14, 2007 3:22 pm

    I’ll have to look those up. Her book Evening Class is also structured like a collection of stories, focusing on several characters brought together in an informal Italian language class.

  3. maureen on February 14, 2007 7:19 pm

    I’m going to take you up on some of your suggestions. Thanks for offering them up.

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