Consider this your (pretty much) exhaustive, pantry-stocking, be-all, end-all list of 2014 short story collections, fortified with 8 essential vitamins and minerals and guaranteed to keep you reading well into 2015--2016, if you're as slow a reader as I am (case in point: I just now got around to reading Anthony Doerr's collections The Shell Collector and Memory Wall which had been on my To-Be-Read list for nearly a decade).
Now that we're halfway through the year, I thought I'd take a look at this year's harvest of short story collections. What started as a simple task--scanning my bookshelves and scouring publishers' catalogs for new and upcoming releases--soon turned Sisyphean. Every time I thought I had the boulder at the top of the hill, I'd find another overlooked title and the search started to roll back on me. Which leads me to conclude: 1) there are a helluva a lot more short story collections being published each year than I realized; and 2) obituaries for the Short Story are a misprint.
I posted my list at Book Riot a couple of weeks ago; since then, it's more than doubled in size--and I'm sure the roster below is missing several worthy titles (feel free to let me know about them in the comments section). One other note: I confined myself to U.S. releases--primarily to preserve my sanity and your patience in reading this list. Otherwise, it would have been a long post about short fiction.
So, without further ado, here are just some of the 2014 short story collections topping my To-Be-Read pile, starting with three I’ve already swallowed in quick, eager gulps:
“The bath mat looked made of various flavors of old chewing gum.”I could go on and on, but I’d probably get so excited, so overcome by my evangelic fervor for this fiction, that I’d end up transcribing the whole book here for you. And I’m trying to keep these capsules brief. So, I’ll just leave it at this: go buy the damn book. If you’re like me, you’ll be struck dumb with admiration for what McCracken can do with her sentences.
“The soul is liquid, and slow to evaporate. The body's a bucket and liable to slosh.”
“The grandmother was a bright, cellophane-wrapped hard candy of a person: sweet, but not necessarily what a child wanted.”
“His hair looked like it had been combed with a piece of buttered toast.”
It was cozy enough for her, she was feeling no pain, just morphine and voices and a sense of almost being where she belonged. In a coma was fine with her. Coming out of it was a bitch.In “Aftershocks,” a man, a woman, and a dog come together at The Viper Room along Sunset Strip, just months after actor River Phoenix OD'ed on the sidewalk outside. It's not drugs which cause the cataclysm in this story, however, it's the 1994 Northridge earthquake and its aftershocks. It features one of the best descriptions I've read of an earthquake in a long time:
Next I remember a series of violent upward jolts, as if some manic gnome with a jackhammer was working away from deep in the earth's core, shattering our surface with savage glee. I felt the rattling feedback from beneath the floor on my tailbone.In “Payback Time,” the central character is named Jonah, but he could just as easily be Job. Living high in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom, he very quickly finds himself stripped of nearly everything...except his parents' apricot orchard. It's a great portrait of an anxiety-riddled man who thinks he's on top of the world but eventually realizes he may only end up with a bunch of shriveled fruit clinging to thorny branches. SheBooks, a relatively new publisher, has plenty of other short-fiction selections to choose from, including The Wrong Sister by Caroline Leavitt, Mating Calls by Jessica Anya Blau and Stolen Moments by Suzanne Antonetta Paola.
I’ve been a biology professor at the Universidad de Valle de México for over ten years. I specialize in insects. Some people in my field of research have pointed out to me that when I’m in the laboratory or lecture hall I almost always keep to the corners of the room. It’s like when I’m walking along a street; I feel safer if I’m near a wall.
The world was going to end. No question. There was no date, but in any case, very soon-ish. Anyone who was sane believed it and those who didn’t were the zealots and the crazies these days. The same people who’d predicted the end a few years ago now didn’t believe it was going to happen, so they’d begun long-term projects—baby-making, house-painting, dog breeding, reading Moby-Dick. Lucky them if they blithely dismissed the truth.
“Although Kit and Rafe had met in the peace movement, marching, organizing, making no nukes signs, now they wanted to kill each other. They had become, also, a little pro-nuke.”
“Ira had been divorced six months and still couldn’t get his wedding ring off.”
“’If dolphins tasted good,’ he said, ‘we wouldn’t even know about their language.’”
The day outside is hazy and gray; the fan on the counter blows dust. Jell-O spins slowly in a glass case. The radio, always a notch too loud for my taste, is turned up even higher for news hour. British troops have left Egypt, the Army-McCarthy Hearings are in full swing and the man who invented the zipper has dropped dead.
Mrs. Arunachalam, who was seven months pregnant and spread across the middle seat of my taxi van, wanted to make the eleven-hour journey to Jaffna in small stages, like an ant on a sugar trail. She ought not to have been travelling at all, the way she sighed and swooned, but her husband was very keen to show her a property in Jaffna that he intended to buy and develop as their new family home, and so she had come.
It did not end in one of the usual ways. It did not disintegrate or implode or go up in flames. Max and Allison Bloom’s marriage ended in a five-round fight in a ring on their front lawn.In other stories, David James Poissant gives us babies that glow, men wrestling an alligator, and a wolf who pays a visit in the middle of the night (taking a seat at the narrator’s dining room table and lapping up a bowl of coffee). I’m prepared for a TKO from Poissant’s fiction.
For no good reason, we were flying to Chicago. Our connecting flight had already left, and there was no hope of another that night. The flight attendant was a cruel sentinel. Stubbornly unattractive, she skulked in the corner, preemptively dismissing the complaints we all were thinking.I just love that phrase "stubbornly unattractive." Succinct and fresh, it paints a clear picture of this “cruel sentinel” in just two words. Or consider this opening paragraph to the story “I Know Who You Are”:
I was sitting at a desk in New York, an enormous desk with too many small things on it. The smallest thing was a paperclip. I mauled the paperclip. It was the only one. I turned it into an S and then a triangle. With my index finger, I launched the triangle into the door. The paperclip bounced cleanly onto the carpet.Haven't we all mauled paperclips at one point in our lives? I'm attracted to Clouther's writing by its blunt, simple style--which I know can be a turn-off to some readers. But not me. I dig snub-nosed stories like this.
Know your load.Most of the other first lines in this collection are no less hook-y:
That’s rule numero uno in this business, which is why I make them count the penguins out in front of me one at a time. I’m not going to be the schmuck who shows up in Orlando two birds short of a dinner party. Or the screw-up who's got to explain to the highway patrol exactly how sixty kilos of coke ended up in his rig without his noticing. Short John Silver used to tell about one fellow who kept trying to turn his radio off, over and over again, but it just wouldn't shut off, and when he pulled into a rest stop for the night, he realized he'd got a ten-piece mariachi band camping out in his trailer. So I always insist on a comprehensive inventory. And the guys at the zoo grumble about it, giving me looks as icy as the day is hot, but they do it. So I know I’m pulling out of Houston with exactly forty-two Gentoo penguins, seventeen Jamaican land iguanas, four tuataras from New Zealand, and a pair of rare, civet-like mammals called linsangs. No more, no less.”
“Miss Stanley was new to the ninth grade that autumn, and we could all sense that she wasn't cut out for it.”I don't know about you, but when I see authors wield this much control and authority over their fiction from the first sentence, I just know the rest of the book will have a satisfying pay-off.
“The woman who was not my mother was named Sheila Stanton and at the age of nineteen she was held captive for ninety-one days by the Red Ribbon Strangler.“
“Nothing sells tombstones like a Girl Scout in uniform.”
“Another family crisis: The rabbit goes blind.”
Because I'd seen part of a documentary on gurus who slept on beds of nails, and because I'd tried to quit smoking before my wife came back home after leaving for nine months in order to birth our first child--though she would come back childless and say it was all a lie she made up in order to check into some kind of speech clinic up in Minnesota to lose her bilateral lisp--I had a dream of chairs and beds adorned entirely with ancient car cigarette lighters. This wasn’t the kind of dream a person could forget or disobey.Between Wrecks also includes the story “I Would Be Remiss,” 60 pages of “thank yous” by the (fictional) author of (the equally-fictional) No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee. This is followed directly by Singleton’s own (single-page) Acknowledgements in which, among others, he thanks his agent “for agreeing that I should not bow to the pressure of writing another novel.” Amen.
“Ellen is convinced her daughter’s lesson horse is the reincarnation of her mother.”Now, be honest, could you resist reading what follows after eye-popping beginnings like those?
“When Angela comes out of the anesthesia, she asks for a dirty martini with an onion instead of an olive. In truth, she just wants to be healthy again.”
“Two hours before the competition, we find a pink shoe box of scorched hair in the hotel lobby.”
“Gabe follows me around the house. He’s the cadaver we’re dissecting in Gross Anatomy.”
“Your lover hasn’t always been a camel.”
“Hannah found his left ear in the laundry hamper.”
Percy took Intro to US Labor History for an elective in the spring of his sophomore year. The professor's name was Leon Pitzer, an embittered pinko genius with an august limp. In him Percy knew he had finally found the father surrogate he'd been searching for since arriving at Schmall, a semi-elite liberal arts college in a town of the same name in the heart of the heart of Ohio.Good Lord, there's a lot to love just in those 70 words. Here's a tantalizing taste of what we can expect to find in the following pages:
A man writes his girlfriend a Dear John letter, gets in his car, and just drives. A widowed insomniac is roused from malaise when an alligator appears in her backyard. A group of college friends try to stay close after graduation, but are drawn away from--and back toward--each other by the choices they make. A boy's friendship with a pair of identical twins undergoes a strange and tragic evolution over the course of adolescence. A promising academic and her fiancee attempt to finish their dissertations, but struggle with writer's block, a nasty secret, and their own expert knowledge of Freud.
The freezing rain sifts down, handfuls of shining rice thrown by some unseen celebrant. Wherever it hits, it crystallizes into a granulated coating of ice. In the streetlights it looks so beautiful: like fairy silver, thinks Constance. But then, she would think that; she's far too prone to enchantment. The beauty is an illusion, and also a warning: there's a dark side to beauty, as with poisonous butterflies. She ought to be considering the dangers, the hazards, the grief this ice storm is going to bring to many; is already bringing, according to the television news.This is the first collection of short fiction from Atwood since 2006's Moral Disorder. The wait, by all appearances, has been well worth it.
The book does a number on you before you've even opened it—that cover. It's a great cover: a square of light from a window falls on a dark lawn, the oblong silhouette of a figure standing inside stretches out along the grass. There's a duality at work here: the watcher is in a lit room, peering out into darkness, while the reader lurks outside, crouched behind a bit of shrubbery, looking in, clandestine.Click here to read the rest of Derek's review. The book's characters range from assassins (Lee Harvey Oswald in "The Passage" and John Hinckley Jr. in "Lubbock is Not a Place of the Spirit") to voyeurs (a married couple finds their sex life taking a deviant turn as they spy on their fifteen-year-old neighbor--definitely inappropriate behavior). These might be squirm-worthy stories (they stay with you "like an open-palm slap to the face," Harmening writes), but I think it's good to have discomfort in our fiction every now and then--just to keep us grounded in reality.
And this feeling doesn't go away. From its first pages, Inappropriate Behavior feels like an exercise in voyeurism; we are shown things these characters surely would not want us to see, or we watch them see what they shouldn't see. They are men and women, desperate one and all, pushed to their limits and compelled to transform lest they implode entirely.
Old Filth had been a delightful man. The occasional kink, but a delightful man. A self-mocking man. The name had been his own invention, a joke against himself: a well-worn joke now but he had been the one to think of it first. "Failed In London Try Hong Kong." Good old legal joke.In her introduction to this collection, Gardam cites James Joyce's Dubliners as a primary influence on her writing: "[He] showed me how...short stories can have the power to burn up the chaff, harden the steel without comment or embellishment or explanation." That's Gardam in a nutshell: simple, direct, furnace-hot.
I want to be banished. I want to return. I want to fascinate someone's ignorance. I want to shake coins from myself. I want to fill my bathing suit with corkscrews. ("Alcyone")
The outside world and I were like cracked magnets. We had been one and the same, but we'd broken apart and could now do nothing but resist. ("Somebody Else's")
Despite your best efforts, remember that ridiculous night in Grasse when you drank too much good French wine in the cafe, and how strong the summer breeze was on the short walk back to the hotel, and how she had that loose dress on that the wind nearly knocked off, and how her ankle turned gently on the cobblestones and how instead of leaning to help her up, you stretched yourself out on the ground beside her and twined yourself into her spilled limbs, and how you lay there breathing in the moist Provence air, clean and fragrant, and how she imagined aloud the wind undressing the flowers in the fields that surrounded the town, and how when you kissed her bare shoulder, you swore you could taste the jasmine on her skin. ("Recipe For Her Absence")
Another man looked at me like I might gnaw off his face before dragging him into a bush. He calmed down and we shared a holy week of drinking. ("A Violence")
At fourteen they diagnosed me with scoliosis, which basically meant my spine kept trying to sneak west. ("Bent Back")
The minimalist style we encounter is clean, transparent, subtle and stunningly precise. It is a challenge to find an unessential word or a superfluous phrase. Reading one of her texts is like watching a cat walk across a laid dinner table. A brief short story can often cover decades, summarising a life, as she moves deftly between different periods. No wonder Alice Munro is often able to say more in 30 pages than an ordinary novelist is capable of in 300.Ardent Munro-ers probably have all these stories already, but for those who've only lightly sampled her--or (perish the thought!) have yet to encounter her works--this would be a good place to start. Prepare to furnish your bookshelves with this collection in November.
Nothing is simple for the men and women in Donald Antrim’s stories. As they do the things we all do—bum a cigarette at a party, stroll with a girlfriend down Madison Avenue, take a kid to the zoo—they’re confronted with their own uncooperative selves. These artists, writers, lawyers, teachers, and actors make fools of themselves, spiral out of control, have delusions of grandeur, despair, and find it hard to imagine a future. They talk, they listen, they hope, they dream. They look for communion in a city, both beautiful and menacing, which can promise so much and yield so little. But they are hungry for life. They want to love and be loved.
Comprised of a surprising mix of newly minted professionals, ex-prisoners, intellectuals, musicians, and faithful Party workers, the community is vibrant and resilient and life in Magadan thrives even under the cover of near-perpetual snow. By blending history and fable, each of Melnik's stories transports us somewhere completely new: a married Magadan woman considers a proposition from an Italian footballer in '70s Moscow; an ailing young girl visits a witch doctor’s house where nothing is as it seems; a middle-aged dance teacher is entranced by a new student’s raw talent; a former Soviet boss tells his granddaughter the story of a thorny friendship; and a woman in 1958 jumps into a marriage with an army officer far too soon. Weaving in and out of the last half of the twentieth century, Snow in May is an inventive, gorgeously rendered, and touching portrait of lives lived on the periphery where, despite their isolation—and perhaps because of it—the most seemingly insignificant moments can be beautiful, haunting, and effervescent.
Now I've accepted Jesus Christ into my heart, though He comes and goes--so much on His mind, I suppose one cannot blame Him--how to concentrate on any one single thing--still, He's filled my heart and I will waste my first shot but thereafter I am Christ-bound to defend myself--standing twenty-five feet from this filthy Catiline, I burrow my feet in the pebbles and I slip and the hair trigger goes off and I'm not afforded the dignity of delope--has the Lord forsaken me, too?--Burr fires his ball and a full lifetime ticks by before it burrs into my body, and in that eternity, I realize that we are a two-sided coin flipped by Fate and here I land facedown and forlorn and I forgive him everything.Here's the publisher's synopsis:
In this compact collection, "settling the score" provides a fascinating apparatus for exploring foundational civilizing ideas. Notions of courage, cowardice, and revenge course through Michael Garriga's flash fiction pieces, each one of which captures a duel's decisive moment from three distinct perspectives: opposing accounts from the individual duelists, followed by the third account of a witness. In razor-honed language, the voices of the duelists take center stage, training a spotlight on the litany of misguided beliefs and perceptions that lead individuals into such conflicts. From Cain and Abel to Andrew Jackson and Charles Dickenson; from John Henry and the steam drill to an alcoholic fighting the bottle: the cumulative effect of these powerful pieces is a probing and disconcerting look at humankind's long-held notions of pride, honor, vengeance, and satisfaction.Bonus: the stories are accompanied with illustrations by Tynan Kerr.
He brought his fingers up and then very carefully and quickly snapped the fingers shut on the arched yellow wings. The butterfly struggled, but its wings were caught and its fragile black body vibrated in its writhings. The yellow dust on the wings rubbed off and filtered down, lightly.
It will know I am not dead, the man thought. It alone, if nothing else, will know.
Told with perfect rhythm and unyielding brutality, these stories expose unsuspecting men and women to the realities of nature, the primal instincts of man, and the dark humor and heartbreak of our struggle to not only thrive, but survive. In "Girl on Girl," a high school freshman goes to disturbing lengths to help an old friend. An insatiable temptress pursues the one man she can't have in "Meteorologist Dave Santana." And in the title story, a long fraught friendship comes undone when three buddies get impossibly lost on a lake it is impossible to get lost on. In Diane Cook's perilous worlds, the quotidian surface conceals an unexpected surreality that illuminates different facets of our curious, troubling, and bewildering behavior. Other stories explore situations pulled directly from the wild, imposing on human lives the danger, tension, and precariousness of the natural world: a pack of not-needed boys take refuge in a murky forest and compete against each other for their next meal; an alpha male is pursued through city streets by murderous rivals and desirous women; helpless newborns are snatched by a man who stalks them from their suburban yards. Through these characters Cook asks: What is at the root of our most heartless, selfish impulses? Why are people drawn together in such messy, complicated, needful ways? When the unexpected intrudes upon the routine, what do we discover about ourselves?Sample lines (from “Moving On”): “They let me tend to my husband's burial and settle his affairs. Which means I can stay in my house, pretend he is away on business while I stand in the closet and smell his clothes. I cook dinners for two and throw the rest away, or overeat, depending on my mood. I make a time capsule of pictures I won't be allow to keep. I bury it in the yard for a new family to discover.”
I was at home, not making spaghetti. I was trying to eat a little less often, it’s true. A yogurt in the morning, a yogurt at lunchtime, ginger candies in between, and a normal dinner. I don’t think of myself as someone with a “weight issue,” but I had somehow put on a number of pounds just four months into my unemployment, and when I realized that this had happened—I never weigh myself; my brother just said to me, on a visit, “I don’t recognize your legs”—I wasn’t happy about it. Although maybe I was happy about it. Because at least I had something that I knew it wouldn’t be a mistake to really dedicate myself to. I could be like those people who by trying to quit smoking or drinking manage to fit an accomplishment, or at least an attempt at an accomplishment, into every day. Just by aiming to not do something. This particular morning, there was no yogurt left for my breakfast. I could go get some? I could treat myself to maple. Although the maple yogurt was always full cream. But maybe full cream was fine, because it was just a tiny—These lines remind me of a terrific Raymond Carver story, "Whoever Was Using This Bed," which also has a caller dialing a wrong number as its premise. It's all so unsettling, risky, and as dangerous as a cat balancing on a broom.
My phone was ringing.
The caller I.D. read “Unavailable.”
I tend not to answer calls identified as Unavailable. But sometimes Unavailable shows up because someone is calling from, say, the hospital.
“One garlic chicken,” a man’s voice is saying. “One side of salad, with the ginger-miso dressing. Also one white rice. White, not brown. This isn’t for pickup,” he says. “It’s for delivery.”
He probably has the wrong number, I figure. I mean, of course he has the wrong—
“Not the lemon chicken,” he is going on. “I don’t want the lemon. What I want—”
“O.K. I knew—”
“Last time, you delivered the wrong thing—”
“Lemon chicken—”
“Garlic chicken—”
“O.K.—”
“I know you,” he says.
“What?”
“Don’t just say ‘O.K.’ and then bring me the wrong order. O.K., O.K., O.K. Don’t just say ‘O.K.’ ” He starts dictating his address. I have no pencil in hand.
“O.K.,” I say. “I mean: all right.” I’ve lost track of whether it was the lemon chicken or the garlic he wanted. Wanting and not wanting. Which tap is hot and which is cold. I still have trouble with left and right.
Island Fog by John Vanderslice
The sea was rough. It had rained in the afternoon, turning the waves metal gray and triangular. No one was out on deck. Instead, they were collected in this room with him, bits of continental refuse, going to the island in an out of sync time. Doug gave into himself and spent three dollars of his little hoard for a Sam Adams. If the beer didn't satisfy him, he decided, he would buy another. If he was going to be poor, he might as well be poor and buzzed. If he ran out of food money he'd live on Ramen noodles and tap water until payday. The beer was more important. It calmed him.Here are some words of praise about John Vanderslice's Island Fog from short-story writer David Jauss (Glossolalia):
"This island feels like some mad doctor’s lab experiment”—so says one of the fictional residents of Nantucket Island, the setting of John Vanderslice’s extraordinary story collection Island Fog. But Vanderslice is by no means a mad doctor, though he is definitely one insanely talented writer. In the eleven literary experiments that comprise his book, he brilliantly parses the soul of America from 1795 to 2005 through the microcosm of Nantucket Island. To borrow the words of yet another of his characters, he conveys “the awful weight of history pressing down upon the island” and conveys it so viscerally that we feel that “time has stopped or has circled around on itself” and we are “back inside that living spiraling body, that awful protean force” that was, and is, not just the island but America. This is a book that anyone interested in the grand, failed experiment that is America should read. It will open your eyes, and your heart.Island Fog is set to envelop you starting in October.
Taking us to Venice during film festival season, where a woman buys a Chanel dress she can barely afford; to a sun-drenched Greek village at the height of the summer holidays, where a teenager encounters the shocks of first love; and to a classical dance community in southern India, where a couple gives in to the urge to wander, these remarkable tales bring to life characters stepping outside their boundaries into new passions and destinies.
Stuart Dybek's stories occupy a territory somewhere between Vladimir Nabokov and Nelson Algren—beguiled by the play of language but also gritty and specific, fundamentally urban at their core. This makes sense, I suppose: Born in 1942, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a native of Chicago, Dybek is a product of the classroom and the streets. Although he's received a Guggenheim and a MacArthur "genius" grant, he doesn't publish often; his last book of fiction, I Sailed With Magellan, came out in 2003.
And yet, to read him is to be reminded of the resonance of small moments, the connections that arise and dissipate with the passing power of a thought. "[T]he story might at first be no more than a scent," Dybek observes in "Fiction": "a measure of the time spent folded in a cedar drawer that's detectable on a silk camisole." What he's getting at is the power of inference, the longing implied, and inspired, by a gesture or a phrase.
"Fiction" comes late in Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories. The book takes its title from a line in The Great Gatsby: "First he nodded politely, and then his face broke into that radiant and understanding smile, as if we'd been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all the time." It's a superlative collection, and its appearance would be notable even if it weren't accompanied by a companion volume, Paper Lantern: Love Stories, which has been published simultaneously.
The acuity of such a move resides in the relationship of the books to each other; each can be read on its own terms, but it is in the juxtaposition that they deepen as we notice echoes, interactions, reprises.
There are crazed nuns hijacking streetcars, eerie adventures across frozen ponds, and a boy who is visited by a miniature bride and groom every night in his uncle’s doomsday compound. Whether they are about a simple transaction, a brave inquiry, a difficult negotiation, or shared bliss, the stories in Ecstatic Cahoots target the friction between our need for ecstatic self-transcendence and our passionate longing for trust between lovers, friends, family, and even strangers.And here's what you'll find in Paper Lantern: Love Stories:
An execution triggers the recollection of a theatrical romance; then a social worker falls for his own client; and lovers part as giddily, perhaps as hopelessly, as a kid trying to hang on to a boisterous kite. A flaming laboratory evokes a steamy midnight drive across terrain both familiar and strange, and an eerily ringing phone becomes the telltale signature of a dark betrayal. Each story is marked with contagious desire, spontaneous revelation, and, ultimately, resigned courage. As one woman whispers when she sets a notebook filled with her sketches drifting out to sea, “Someone will find you.”
Those dawns I rose from the boat of our bed, one bare foot on the frosty floor and then the other, my wife would roll in her sleep; toss, tangled in the snarl of blankets, as her near-closed eyes sought me out in the tin-blue of morning. "Don't go," she would say. "Listen to that wind today. Can't you hear those breakers?"I can practically taste the salt of those shore-crashed waves with fine writing like that. The New England weather in these pages might be forbidding, but Harmon's prose invites us inside to sit for a spell beside a crackling fire. Did I mention History of Cold Seasons will be released in November? A little something for your winter reading pleasure.
Anna Riley and Anne Cavanaugh have had a lover in common, but it's not until a pivotal moment in one of their lives that their paths unforgettably converge. Peter Herring was the center of Anne's universe in college, and now, a few years later, he's become the center of Anna's, and merely a minor player in his ex-girlfriend's world. That is, until Peter and Anna are invited into Anne's parents' home to visit with her dying mother, and he finds himself drawn back into her orbit. Years later, when her own mother is dying, Anna will find herself yearning to reach out to Anne, with whom she had shared such a brief but intimate bond, and find solace in that moment from long ago. Perspective evolves with time, and so with time, what Peter means to each woman-as lover, as friend, as connection to the past-also evolves. Through exploring Anne's and Anna's ties to Peter and unfolding the narratives of the people who weave meaningfully in and out of their lives, Polly Dugan reveals the power of family secrets, the ripple effects of her characters' emotional choices, and how poignantly their intertwined relationships shape who they are and how they love.Here's a bit of praise from Alan Heathcock, himself the author of an exceptional collection of short stories, Volt: "Polly Dugan makes the greatest deal the best of literature can offer--she will be honest, completely bare, and deliver a reader wholly into the secret world of her character's empathy. What a powerful and glorious thing it was to become these characters, to have my worldview touched by their lives. It's a rare skill to write pain with such love, such care, such warmth, and like Alice Munro and Elizabeth Strout, Polly Dugan has achieved a small miracle in breaking my heart and still having me ask for more. So Much a Part of You announces a potent and fresh new voice to the landscape of short fiction."
Fleming awoke in the dark and his room felt loose, sloshing so badly he gripped the bed. From his window there was nothing but a hallway, and if he craned his neck, a blown lightbulb swung into view. The room pitched up and down and for a moment he thought he might be sick. The word “hallway” must have a nautical name. Why didn’t they supply a glossary for this cruise? Probably they had, in the welcome packet he’d failed to read. A glossary. A history of the boat, which would be referred to as a ship. Sunny biographies of the captain and crew, who had always dreamed of this life. Lobotomized histories of the islands they’d visit. Who else had sailed this way. Famous suckwads from the past, slicing through this very water on wooden longships.From reviews I've read, Marcus' experimental style is an acquired taste; but, hey, he had me at "All aboard!" with this one story at least. Here's more about the collection from the publisher:
In the dystopian “Rollingwood,” a divorced father struggles to take care of his ill infant, as his ex-wife and colleagues try to render him irrelevant. In “Watching Mysteries with My Mother,” a son meditates on his mother’s mortality, hoping to stave off her death for as long as he sits by her side. And in the title story, told in a single breathtaking sentence, we watch as the narrator’s marriage and his sanity unravel, drawing him to the brink of suicide.
A girl ditches her innocence at a state fair. Strippers ponder love over a Brazilian wax. A father falls for a drug-addled babysitter. A mother ends a pregnancy. Doll Palace dwells in the harder-edged territories of human compassion, navigating the powerful, often unsettling ground rarely spoken of with candor, care, and grace. Written in spare yet vulnerable prose, Doll Palace is that rare collection that invites imitation but leaves a vast majority wondering how she did it.Want to see what she did? Click here to read the story "Whipping Post." It's raw and electric and unforgettable.
a luscious feast of language that encompasses real estate and forlorn pets, adolescents and sixtysomethings, weekly liaisons and obsessive affairs, "certain types of threat and the odder edges of sweet things." The women and men in these dozen stories search for love, solace, and a clear glimpse of what their lives have become. Anything can set them off thinking--the sad homogeneity of hotel breakfasts, a sex shop operated under Canadian values (whatever those are), an army of joggers dressed as Santa. With her boundless empathy and gift for the perfect phrase, Kennedy makes us care about each of her characters. In "Takes You Home," a man's attempt to sell his flat becomes a journey to the interior, by turns comic and harrowing. And "Late in Life" deftly evokes an intergenerational love affair free of the usual cliches, the younger partner asking the older, "What should I wear at your funeral?"Damn. She had me at "jogging Santas."
