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Thought we'd start off National Short Story Month with a read of an online journal short story. "Sex Coffee" by Desiree Cooper comes to us from Blood Orange Review. This is a great little flash piece that starts off:
You walk into the coffeehouse and pick a seat beside the thin woman whose beauty is coiled into tight vines of hair. Never seen her here before, you think as you slide into the bench beside her, careful not to get caught looking in her direction.
You take off your coat, power up your laptop, check your cell phone for messages. You coyly lay your trap.
I generally like second person point of view pieces--one thing I've found is that those that have made it into publication are usually written very well. I almost think that a little extra care must have gone into each one to help the story/poem/novel/essay get past whatever hang-ups an editor might have had about the point of view.
I like how, even though this is a pretty short flash, Cooper was able to find something to use as a thread from beginning to end--from the third paragraph:
The skinny, clear-skinned woman looks up, a gazelle at the watering hole.
From later toward the very end of the piece:
She leans so close to your lips, you can smell the savannah in her pores.
It's an example to me of the little things that Cooper does within her stories, both flash and the longer pieces, that elevates her work. Examples like this are easy to spot throughout Cooper's stories. "Sex Coffee" is an excellent flash capturing a certain type of dude just perfectly. While short in length, it doesn't lack any power, not wasting any words or space on the page. A great start to the month and just one more great effort from Desiree Cooper.
Reminder--May will be National Short Story Month around the EWN. Here's hoping many others join in as well.
Looking for guest posts--basically anything dealing with short stories--reviews of stories, reviews of collections, looks at authors that are known as short story writers, interviews, etc.
My own plans include:
a) reviewing at least a story a day
b) going through the Dzanc Books published short story collections and noting what I remember about their being selected for publication and something about the stories within
c) looking at story collections by Dzanc authors published by other publishers
And for Twitter folks, I think a simple #NSSM2016 should help everybody find as many posts as possible throughout the month.
By: Maggie Belnap,
on 5/31/2014
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By Maggie Belnap
Short stories populate many childhoods, with the aim to instill morals and virtues in undeveloped and wandering minds. Whether it’s the tale of Rumpelstiltskin or the Boy Who Cried Wolf, these tales make a powerful impression. Take our short stories quiz, based off of Oscar Wilde’s The Complete Short Stories and The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, 2nd ed, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, and see if you really know your short stories.
Your Score:
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Maggie Belnap is a Social Media Intern at Oxford University Press. She attends Amherst College.
The Complete Short Stories by Oscar Wilde is edited by John Sloan. He is Fellow and Tutor in English, Harris Manchester College, Oxford. The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, 2nd ed, is edited by Joyce Carol Oates. Oates is the National Book Award-winning author of over fifty novels, including bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, and The Gravedigger’s Daughter. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University.
Oscar Wilde is the author of “The Happy Prince,” “The Fisherman and His Soul,” “The Nightengale and the Rose,” “The Star Child,” and “The Young King.” Washington Irving is the author of “Rip Van Winkle.” James Baldwin is the author of “Sonny’s Blues.”
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The post How well do you know short stories? appeared first on OUPblog.
Wayne State University Press publishes a series titled Made in Michigan that has published many quite enjoyable story and poetry collections. This month sees the publishing of Strange Love, a collection by Lisa Lenzo (her second, the first won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award (University of Iowa Press).
I've had the pleasure of reading the first two stories and realizing that they're linked--a divorced, single mother, Annie, raising her daughter, Marly, (8 in story one, 12 in story two) in what seems to be in the SW Michigan area. So far both stories have delved into the idea of looking for love--the first, "Still Life," with Annie considering following up on personal ads to find somebody to date, while "Aliens" has Annie come to the realization that Marly has added sexual activity to her lifestyle.
Both are great stories--they're subtle, they sneak humor in when you're not expecting it, they don't have a BIG moment smacking the reader about the head three or four times--they don't need to.
I'm very much looking forward to seeing where Annie and Marly head in the other seven stories.
A short little story collection, Karate Chop by Dorthe Nors (translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken) from Graywolf Press is full of short gems. Stories that might seem like they'll be cute or simply slide toward the dark or weird.
"The Duckling" begins:
Alongside the big farm, dad ran a duck farm, and because he was a clever man he earned a lot of money from it.
A story called "The Duckling" starting off that way--how dark can it get? Well at some point the dad gives the daughter who narrates the story a duckling born somewhat unhealthy, giving her a chance to raise it. Her thought is to put it in a bowl lined with a towel and put it in the oven to keep it warm. Perhaps not so surprisingly it dies. In a nice upswing however, they have a nice father/daughter moment burying the duckling together.
Another story, "Female Killers" has a married man staying up after his wife has gone to bed and he starts wandering the internet. He ends up looking up various female killers and maybe the only thing stranger than the facts that start to pop up about the killers is the thoughts that pop into the man's head about the female killers--they're odd, they're scary--they're inspired writing. He worries for the son (given up at birth) of the serial killer that will one day find out her name and find there are over 200,000 hits for her on Google; he thinks of chimps killing bush babies with spears they've made when put in the position of being hungry.
Nors' stories are short, but not quite what I'd consider minimalist. They have big ideas and just get to them quickly. It's a very entertaining collection and one you'll read in a day.
The first book from the folks at A Strange Object, Kelly Luce's short story collection, Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail is a wonderful little object.
It is filled with ten stories, all of which had been previously published in journals such as The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Crazy Horse, and others.
Luce brings a great sense of imagination to her stories but doesn't stop there with the great and interesting ideas--she then follows up with observations on how people live and might react to such ideas and perhaps it's the combination of having lived both in the United States and in Japan for some time that gives her a slightly unique perspective.
The story "Reunion" begins:
Over the course of that interminable weekend after Jun died, Asian lady beetles overtook our place in the shadowy Tatsuka-cho. Orange, winged bodies coated the ceiling and left yellow stains; carapaces crunched underfoot against the bathroom tile. The air smelled like rancid walnuts.
It's an opening that has me pushing forward for sure--we know somebody has died, and the odd scenario of so many beetles taking over that they're crunching under the narrator's feet as she (we find out) walks in her apartment.
The protagonist moved into a room that her next-door neighbor offers her--her own husband having recently passed away himself. He had been a vacuum-cleaner designer and there were parts strewn throughout the small apartment she offered to the protagonist. One in fact almost looked like a person the way it's puffed up bag stood, like the torso of a human, sitting atop an odd assortment of feet.
The reader finds out that Jun had just given the protagonist the news that he was finally divorcing his wife--that soon they'd be able to be seen in public together, that their relationship would become more real. She reminisces a bit about their first time out together, a fair and losing at the three shell game over and over--the evening that they first kissed. The next door neighbor leaves her to her new place alone and after an interaction with the human looking vacuum-cleaner, the protagonist apparently falls into a dream beginning with:
...and a barker called out, his voice like a hook:
One night only, for sale at cost, everything you've ever lost!
And at this point she notices a stuffed animal on the table--one that she lost when she was a very young girl, it had fallen off the back of her mother's bike and even though she'd made her mother re-trace their steps close to a dozen times, it was never found. She places money on the table and takes the stuffed animal. She then sees other things she's lost over the years--socks, hair ties, a boot--and buys them all back. It's a strange scenario and seemingly adds a little more to the imaginiative side of Luce's writing. However she ends it in a powerful manner:
The last table held just one thing, a fist-sized, crimson lmp that shivered and thrashed like a fish out of water. I stared until it became a red blur. No price tag. My wallet was empty anyway. I turned away, my arms full and an empty feeling in my chest, a feeling like three shells and a realization--no ball, there never was a ball--and listened for a voice, any voice, to bring me back.
Having read the bulk of this small collection I'm happy to say that Luce continues doing this--finding new and interesting scenarios to dig her way into being able to write about every day ongoings. Not only having something to say, but doing so in an interesting way that maybe hasn't been done before. She definitely had me more than willing to start each new story just as soon as I finished the prior one.
And because a) I skimped out on Poetry month in April and b) I'm always happy to find a way to link to Hobart, here is a Chicago Cub Sestina written by Ms. Luce.
To date I believe this story has only seen the light of day in a limited edition (500 copies, 450 of which were signed, numbered and made available for sale) hardcover single story edition. Hair O' The Chine was published by Bruccoli Clark in 1979. The subtitle for this story is "A Documentary Film Script" and as Robert Coover has been known to do, it's a close and interesting look at a fairy tale, in this case that of The Three Little Pigs.
As Coover has also been known to do, this story takes a look at this particular fairy tale through lenses such as religion as well as sexuality. Slightly similar to his often anthologized story "The Babysitter," this story is told in fragments--though it differs, in my opinion, from "The Babysitter" in that Hair O' The Chine's fragments appear to be in chronological order.
It's been some time since I've read anything about, or including The Three Little Pigs itself, much of what Coover brings about was still familiar to me. However, the sections involving the pig and the wolf (told in documentary style to be explained shortly) were interspersed with sections about a man and a maid--two individuals that very may well have been in the original fairy tale--but even if they weren't, they fit in very well in Coover's story.
The documentary film style fragments specific to the pig and the wolf include scene descriptions (fade, pan, zoom in, etc.) and voiceovers for what is being "seen" by the reader. Much of the voiceover work is describing what how scholars and theologians have described what they've seen and determined the work to mean.
Cut to the pig in the window, as before. Silence, except for a faint distant whimpering and the soft tinkle of the children's song, heard before. The camera occupies itself with a slow scan of the entire tableau. The song and the whimpering gradually fade away. After a pause, the Voice clears its throat and, in something of a monotone at first, resumes:
Many have related this Temptation Sequence...
Quick pan back to the pig in the window, Voice continuing uninterrupted:
...to that of Christ in the Wilderness, while still other paraphrasts, grabbing at that infamous...ah...apple, argue again for the Adamic thing. Titus, whom we have mentioned, while not entirely throwing in with the theologians, has certainly furthered their cause with his exploitation of the well-known etymological relationship--indeed, identity--between "hog" and "lamb" in his book, Christ and the Brick, though his primary purpose is to demonstrate that Christ founded his church on a brick, not a rock. Now, may I have--?
Zoom back to reveal entire tableau once more with the text below. Voice:
Yes. Now, insofar as the red apple is a timeless image, of course, the one-track Adamists do not seem entirely astray, but their thesis that the abundant corn is a symbol of Eden, and the butterchurn one of labor in exile, shows how truly remote these boys are from this or any other world. All right, then, the actual temptations, so-called, are three: the pig is invited to a cornfield...
Zoom in to the cornfield at the extreme right of the tableau.
...an orchard...
Pan left to the apple tree
...and a fair, to receive ears of corn...
Back to the cornfield.
...russet apples...
Again to the apple tree.
...and a "bargain," which turns out to be...
Pan left to the butterchurn.
...yes, a butterchurn. On each occasion, the pig feels obliged somehow to accept the invitation, and on each occasion, the pig's danger is augmented. We seem to discover here, do we not, something approximating a series of trysts, of boy-girl dates, with the wolf making greater and greater advances. Though the pig escapes easily the first time, he--or she--must send the wolf chasing "an apple" the second time, and finally must wallop him with this the...uh...oh, oh...
Children's music distantly again, played on bells, as before. Close-up of the butterchurn in the clearing, as seen earlier. A slender hand reaches out from off-camera and touches it with the tip of one finger. The finger trails softly down the length of the churnstaff.
I've tried, with this selection from just beyond the middle of this story, to dip at least a little into each of the things Coover's got going on throughout this story. There's not so much of the man and maid here (though that is the maid's finger trailing softly down the length of the churnstaff in what one can only assume at this point, especially with the Voiced "uh...oh, oh..." above, to be just as sexual as one would believe from a Robert Coover story.
As always, Coover gives his readers much to think about, much to simply enjoy, and many fantastic, winding, meandering, thrilling sentences.
The story "Church" is in the Spring 2013 issue of Ploughshares and per her 
contributor notes, is Kimblery Swayze's first story published (along with some previously published poetry). Let's hope as readers that it's not the last one she publishes.
Because he could not afford to bury her, Wilson was still living with his mother.
That's how Swayze opens the story--seriously, how in the hell do you not read the second sentence after that beginning? Which is:
On the whole, though, his luck was holding.
What? He's living with the dead body of his mother--how well can his luck be holding? I'm definitely in at this point and over the course of the next 11 or 12 pages, Swayze doesn't give me any reason to let myself wander to another writer in this journal--the writing is gritty, it's full of surprises, for example:
He did not want her touching him. She drew closer, pusher her face against his shoulder. He could feel the warmth of her body. He edged away, as far as he could go. Darlene slid closer, trapping him against the door. She put her hand on his thigh. She began to stroke, using her palm, her fingernails.
Obviously we all know where this is headed...
Wilson's stomach roiled, his mouth filled with brine. he knew what would happen next. Wilson clenched his jaws together, choking as his mouth filled up. He made a desperate attempt to shove her away in time but he wasn't fast enough. She shrieked, leapt aside, snatcher her purse away from the stream of vomit. Her jacket, her furry boots, were splattered.
Not quite what I was expecting. Swayze's writing is exciting--again, gritty (as seen above), and takes on a pretty dark subject and goes maybe even farther than is comfortable--which is exactly how I prefer the writers I read deliver their works. I'll be watching for more work from Kimberly Swayze for sure.
A fantastic collection, Ralph Lombreglia's debut. I first read the title story in BASS 1987 in a class. I enjoyed it enough to keep the name on my radar and purchased his full collection once I found it.
Much as I enjoyed the title story, I think I actually liked "Inn Essence" a little bit more--the story of a slightly crazed, perfectionist, dessert chef as well as the others that worked in the restaurant that he did had some intrigue, a lot of humor, great sentences, and reminded me a little of T.C. Boyle's "Sorry Fugu," only maybe a little bit better--which at that time was close to reading opinion sacrilege where I was concerned.
Other great include "Museum of Love," the story of a house turned museum as it showed off the development and breakdown of a love affair--with the dumped male residing in the museum; "Jazzers," a bit of a mid-life crisis story about guys that used to be in a band trying to re-live those glory days a bit (that's a poor description though--much more going on); and again the title story, good enough to be included in BASS that year.
Lombreglia is a great story writer--one that comes up with really cool ideas and then delivers by writing his butt off infusing the stories with humor, with great descriptions, wonderful characters, and again, the humor. It's not beat you over the head "I'm trying to make you laugh" humor, but that fantastically subtle humor that gets you to smile, to chuckle aloud a bit and realize you're in the hands of one that observes his fellow man very well.
Men Under Water is now available in eBook form as part of the Dzanc Books rEprint Series. You can find it here. Something I am thrilled to be able to say.
It has come to my attention that May is Short Story Month. Unfortunately, the month is half gone. If I'd only realized this was coming up, I would have planned my May Days project around writing short stories. I must make a note for next year. And put it someplace where I have a prayer of finding it.
The Emerging Writers Network is getting into this in a big way. The Oxford University Press provided a reading list. The Missouri Review is highlighting a short story every day at its blog. In fact, Short Story Month is all over the Internet.
This seems like an appropriate time to remind everyone of my short story publication this year, Rosemary and Olive Oil, at Alimentum.
A slightly delayed post as its author was out of the country. From Philip F. Deaver:
Gary Forrester’s second book of fiction, The Connoisseur of Love, a collection of twelve short stories, some of them linked, is just out in New Zealand. His first work of fiction was the novel Houseboating in the Ozarks (Dufour Editions, 2006). The recent story collection’s unifying element is the (third person limited) narrator of all but one of the stories, Peter Becker, an attorney in his fifties and sixties (he ages over the time-span of the stories) who is currently employed as a public servant. Becker is an immigrant from a small town in Germany, living life in a second language (English) which, in the design of the book, he may stumble on in dialogue but moves through like a bird in a tree in narration.
In Peter Becker, Forrester creates an odd character trapped in his own internal life, a cross between Walter Mitty and Larry David’s character “Larry David” in “Curb Your Enthusiasm” with touches here and there of Meursault (The Stranger), Bartleby the Scrivener and, perhaps, Billy Pilgrim. Picture the most trapped-in-the-cul de sac-of-self individual you have ever encountered in life or fiction, quietly careening through his latter years in gentle Wellington with the external world mostly on “mute” or at least muffled like the adults in the “Peanuts” cartoons on TV. All through the collection, we find Peter either alone in his own thoughts or, for brief moments, lonely for connection to others, or, the saddest option, lost and self-conscious in some human interaction thrust upon him. He wasn’t born with social connective tissue. Marching in step with other members of the human race challenges him. The closest he comes to regular social interaction is in mixed doubles on the grass courts at Thorndon Tennis Club, where the lines are freshly chalked and clear and he can distract himself with his overly developed urgency to defeat whoever is on the other side of the net.
Thus the title of the collection is meant ironically. When in these stories Peter Becker isn’t sleeping alone in his house in Khandallah (not that love implies sleeping with someone), he’s sleeping there with a pile of tulips or a ukulele. Twice in these stories, Peter attempts to actually have a date. In one, a six foot tall Polynesian beauty from Bora Bora named Lavi captures his attention and he engages her in conversation. He has just refurbished a set of deckchairs he’s acquired, and he’s been sending out invitations in a rare attempt to gin up a party at his home. Lavi would be perfect to take the fifth chair! The guest list would be complete. Astonishly she says yes, she would come; they could meet later at a place where she works and firm things up. She gives him the name of the place where she works, a place with which he’s familiar. Some days later he goes there to meet up and firm up. Nobody there knows her or remembers anyone by her most lovely and memorable description. She hoodwinked him. He cancels the whole party, so put out is he by her cruel trick.
In another story an attractive woman from the travel agency on the lower level of his building gives him attention, it’s rare that someone gives him this kind of
Once again we hit June, and National Short Story Month is technically over, and I'm still doing a NSSM 
post. There are more stories I enjoyed greatly and planned on 
writing about like those from Robin Hemley's recent collection Reply All (University of Indiana Press, 2012)--one in particular about a boy born with the features of a pig is fantastic ("St. Charles Place"), and from Elmore Leonard's Fire in the Hole (William Morrow, 2012), especially a pretty frightening one title "When the Women Come Out to Dance." The new Tin House, beyond the Hempel story I wrote about also has new work from Holly Goddard Jones that is well worth your time, not to mention one from Lee K. (as in King of the short story) Abbott. Absinthe 17 just came out and it's their spotlight on 
Bulgaria issue with mostly novel excerpts but a great story from 
Zdravka Evtimova, "Kuncho," that is "about" a donkey. It's excellent.
I never found the time to write about Brian Evenson's collection, Windeye (Coffee House Press, 2012), nor Jack Driscoll's The World of a Few Minutes Ago (Wayne State University Press, 2012). There was also Josip Novakovich's Infidelities (Harper Perennial, 2005) and Alix Ohlin's forthcoming Signs and Wonders (Vintage, 2012), and Ted Sanders' No Animals We Could Name (Graywolf Press, 2012) and Megan Mayhew Bergman's Birds of a Lesser Paradise (Scribner, 2011). There was also dipping into old, but favorite, 
collections like Dean Paschal's By the Light of the Jukebox (now in Dzanc's rEprint series, 2012, but originally Ontario
The following is a guest post from the wonderful John McNally, who was probably wondering if I was lying about SSM as he was the first author to send me his guest post, over a month ago now. I love this post. While I wasn't doing a lot of drinking while an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in the late 80's, I was spending a ton of time wandering the stacks of the Rackham Graduate Library looking at literary journals:
When I was an undergraduate at Southern Illinois University in the 1980s, I spent a lot of time drinking. A lot of time. But I also spent a lot of time writing, and while working on a story in Morris Library, I would wander the stacks, pulling literary magazines off shelves and piling them up around me, like a fortress around my legal pad and pen. Whenever I was stuck on a story, I would pick up a magazine and start reading it. At that time, I didn’t recognize any writer’s name; I was just trying to learn about writing short stories, and I was eager to start submitting to these strange magazines that came in a variety of shapes. I liked the typewriter font of The Wormwood Review, but they published only poetry, and I wasn’t a poet. I liked the weird covers of The Mississippi Review and the stateliness of The Hudson Review. There was even something appealing about the ugly orange covers of the old Virginia Quarterly Review. A few magazines I became obsessed with, like Beloit Fiction Journal, whose first issues had just come out, and Sou’wester, published by SIU’s sister school in Edwardsville. In other words, I loved them all – the slick-looking ones and the ugly ones alike, the perfect-bound and the saddle-stapled. More importantly, I loved the thrill of discovering new stories.
In Sou’wester, I remember reading the work of a relatively unknown writer named Robert Wexelblatt, who went on to publish a few books of fiction. I discovered Kent Haruf’s beautiful and chilling “Private Debts/Public Holdings” in Grand Street, and I discovered Dan Chaon for the first time in Ploughshares when I read his story “Fraternity.” Andre Dubus often published in Crazyhorse, so I would return to that magazine again and again. Other writers I remember stumbling upon? Eileen Pollack in an issue of Prairie Schooner with mice on its cover. Elizabeth Jolley and Alice Munro in the old Grand Street. Bob Shacochis in The Missouri Review. Tom Perrotta in Columbia Magazine. I remember finding in TriQuarterly a story by David Ordan whose title changed the way I thought about titles: “Any Minute Mom Should Come Blasting through the Door.” Wow! I had to read it. I would make photocopies of my favorite stories and hand them out to friends who might like them, and I would make my own private anthologies of my favorite stories.
As I said, I drank a lot when I was an undergraduate, and I blew off a lot of classes, but one of my fondest memories of those years – and one of my fondest memories of trying to become a writer – was reading all of these great stories for the first time, finding them in the library stacks, and it felt like some kind of great secret that I knew about that my other classmates didn’t, and it was my secret key to unlocking what I was going to do for the rest of my life. And so when my students now c
A couple of recommendations from Pamela Ryder:
A German Picturesque (Knopf) by Jason Schwartz
One wonder what the world actually looks like to Jason Schwartz. Is it a great gallery in which the most mundane of objects become luminous and mysterious, as they are on the page? His sentences are not complex, nor are they bound in the usual contrivances of character and plot, and yet his fictions reveal the intricacies of living in a way that will chill you to the bone. You’ll see.
Further Adventures in the Restless Universe (Dzanc) Stories by Dawn Raffel
She’s a sly one, this Raffel, weighing the most ordinary of situations with the often-missed gravity of human existence. “There’s so little time,” a departing mother tells her daughter. Indeed. Raffel’s stories have us linger in those moments that so quickly pass us by, so quickly we dismiss, and have us know the way of mother and daughter, sister and sister, husband and wife. Her stories bear us away on sentences that “pummel us gently”, as Raffel would say, with a pure lack of sentiment and a nod to what we are most likely to miss.
Pamela Ryder is the author of Correction of Drift (FC2) and A Tendency to Be Gone (Dzanc Books).
A guest post today from Roy Kesey about Zhu Wen:
The questions I most often ask myself are hard questions that do not have good answers such as Why did you just do that stupid painful expensive-to-fix thing? More fun is thinking about short stories for a month and then not exactly out of nowhere asking myself whom I most want to write another book of them.
The rule (arbitrary, crucial): the person must still be alive.
And so now here is today's answer: Zhu Wen.
I hope that you have already read his collection I Love Dollars (brilliantly trans. Julia Lovell, Penguin, 2008), the one where he says things like:
“Faces no longer mattered, in this kind of light.”
and
“It's a great life if you don't weaken. Or at least not as bad as you think it is.”
and
“Plan E was, in short, to wait for death.”
and
“Whenever I see a baby, my heart fills with pity. Why so late, unlucky child?”
and
“'Instant noodles,' he said. His monotone implied neither desire for dialogue nor admiration for my choice; he was just saying it, trying the words out: Instant noodles.”
and
“The plan was to soothe my nerves, but all I ended up with was a droopy scrotum.”
If you haven't then you definitely should. The stories are set in a China getting richer but not better (with the implication that if it were getting poorer, or staying the same, it would also not be getting better). These days Zhu Wen is mostly making movies that win prizes in Europe. The films are each very good, almost as good as his stories, which are glitteringly smart and funny and sad, and it would be great if he'd write some more soon.
Roy Kesey's most recent book is the novel Pacazo (USA: Dzanc Books, 2011; UK & Commonwealth: Random House 2012), which The Times has praised as “big, intelligent and wonderfully original.” His previous books include the award-winning novella Nothing in the World, a historical guide to the Chinese city of Nanjing, and a short story collection called All Over, which made The L Magazine's “Best Books of the Decade” list. His short stories, essays, translations and poems have appeared in more than a hundred magazines and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, The Robert Olen Butler Prize Anthology and New Sudden Fiction. He is the recipient of a 2010 prose fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and currently lives in Peru with his wife and children.
The opening paragraph of Gabriel Blackwell's story, "The Last Film of Alan Smithee," published in Conjunctions 58:
After all that, I chose the avatar that looked most like me: similar build, similar features. I gave him my name, Alan Smithee. I gave him glasses. I felt relatively certain that my wife would have recognized this, at least, as progress. There had been so many choices of what to be—round bodies, flat bodies, flabby bodies, tan, pale, or liver-spotted bodies, bodies with long arms or skinny legs, triangular noses, dimpled chins, jug ears, or thin lips. So many choices. Now it was done. Once, she had opened my cabinet in the kitchen and stood next to me, silent, while I looked in. Six identical rows, seven cans deep—three weeks’ worth of meals. She had opened my closet. Six blue Oxford shirts with left pockets; next to them, a row of plain-front khaki slacks. I had one gray suit that I never wore, though this was never remarked upon. There was no time in my schedule for a job. It took me hours to get dressed. I thought about what I had to do that day. I tried different combinations. I had long ago ceased to eat breakfast—by the time I was dressed, it was lunchtime. I stood in front of the open cabinet in the kitchen, scanning the rows. I could not allow lunchtime to pass in the same way as breakfast had, but I always bitterly regretted my choice, closing off as it did other, very possibly better, choices. Having fewer things to choose from had made these decisions somewhat easier, though of course the smaller differences in each item—of circumstance, of memory, of effect—meant that a high degree of care was still required. In the game, some of these choices had been made for me. I gave my avatar the khaki slacks. I gave my avatar the blue shirt. I gave my avatar the brown shoes. I chose the haircut that I had had since the age of eighteen. My wife had it styled once, the day we got married. I wore a tuxedo in our wedding photographs. People asked if it was me when they saw the photographs. I considered laughing. I considered who was speaking to me. I considered what they 
would want to hear. I considered answering seriously. I considered making a joke. I considered answering with a question of my own. I considered changing the subject. In time, they moved off.
for some reason has me thinking Blackwell was stumbling through some sort of writer's block. The numerous choices in what type of character to write about, or what setting for the story or really any of the innumerable possibilities when staring at that first blank page and how it would be possible to have those variables cause nearly nothing to get done. As the story progresses there does have a feel to it that Blackwell is writing a story that also describes the writing of a story. Whether or not that is the case, what I can say is that he's written an entertaining story that kept my attention from first word to the last and one that's got me thinking--something I always admire in a story.
"The Uninnocent" is the title story of Bradford Morrow's most recent short story collection (Pegasus Books, 2011). This is the second story this month that I've read on my kindle and not in print form--I'm still trying to determine what exactly this does to the reading experience, something smarter people than I have thought about.
An instance. Down by the lake. Blind old dear Bob Coconut, the dog, stiffened in the legs, lying in the long grass. The air blue. Autumn. The water was cold, and red and brown leaves clotted the surface of the lake near the shore, like an oil slick. Angela and I had a sign that day. We'd found a dead ovenbird that'd flown into the kitchen window, and we knew what that meant. Out in the boat, we got our friend Butter calmed down enough so that he would let us tie him up like we always liked to do, and tickled him, and warned him if he laughed we would throw him overboard. The blue air was turning toward purple as the sun moved down into the trees and evening wason us. We'd been so hard at our game we hadn't noticed how quickly the hours passed.
I love this passage--the use of colors, the combination of short, choppy sentences with longer, winding sentences. The oil slick simile. And especially that last sentence, which captures an 
aspect I remember from childhood as well as any I've read.
One aspect of the short story, from a collection (if it's not the last one) via an eReader is that not knowing you're coming to the end of it. Which is what I was wondering as I got to the end of this one and was hit with a complete surprise. Was it due to the fact that I was unaware I was approaching the end of the story? Having thought about it for the last few hours though, I think it's really more due to Morrow's writing--there was certainly some foreshadowing to my surprise, and it was nice and subtle as it should be (in my opinion). It has me looking forward to the rest of the collection.
"The Hat Act" by Robert Coover is the last story in his collection Pricksongs & Descants. This collection was actually my introduction to Coover's work back in 1988 (when it was almost 20 years old) after having read one of the stories from within, "The Babysitter," in an anthology for a creative writing class (Thank you Alyson Hagy!). Dipping in and re-reading various stories this past week or so has been a great reminder of what it was that excited me about Coover's work with this introduction to it.
Re-reading "The Hat Act," I am a little surprised at the difference between my 22 year old reading self vs. my 46 year old reading self. The question is whether or not I actually understand what I read better now, or if perhaps I think a bit too much of my ability to read now and develop theories that are ridiculous?
The story begins:
In the middle of the stage: a plain table.
A man enters, dressed as a magician with black cape and black silk hat. Doffs hat in wide sweep to audience, bows elegantly.
Applause.
He displays inside of hat. It is empty. He thumps it. It is clearly empty. Places hat on table, brim up. Extends both hands over hat, tugs back sleeves exposing wrists, snaps fingers. Reaches in, extracts a rabbit.
Applause.
And it continues going back and forth between the magician's moves, and the crowd's response, though it's not always "Applause."
Later in the story:
Trembling with anxiety, magician presses out first hat, places it brim up on table, crushes second hat on floor. Wads second hat, tries desperately to jam it into first hat. No, it will not fit. Turns irritably to pitch second hat into wings.
Loud booing.
Freezes. Pales. Returns to table with both hats, first in fair condition brim up, second still in a crumpled wad. Faces hats in defeat. Bows head as though to weep silently.
Hissing and Booing.
The story continues on with the magician doing better and better tricks to applause, and then any time the crowd was not as happy as they had been with previous tricks, they let the magician know. And here's where now I think maybe I see something I didn't see 24 years ago--the fact that the story appears to be Coover's description of what it's like to be a writer of fiction, and especially a writer of fiction that tended to walk on the high wire. When that wire wasn't high enough, or dangerous enough, readers would be quick to let him know. At least that's how I see it now--who know what I'll think when I'm reading this story at age 70 in another 24 years.
The ending is a particularly brutal ending that I won't spoil here--I highly suggest you find a copy of this book and read it yourself.
Merrill Joan Gerber's short story, "Latitude," comes from her collection, This is a Voice from Your Past. It begins:
Martha stood under the bright dining-room light behind her mother-in-law, snipping deftly at the gray hairs high on the thick, slightly wrinkled neck. Funny, she thought, that she would trust me at her back with a sharp instrument. She clipped the hairs neatly, feeling them brush her legs as they fell to the floor. When she got home, she would have to shake out her shoes.
This paragraph shines on some of the things I've really enjoyed while getting myself caught up on the decades of great writing Gerber has provided readers with: the humor (the line about the sharp instrument), the frequent writing on family and relationships within, and her attention to detail (that last line).
This particular story moves nicely timewise to give the reader more insight into that first paragraph, and especially the line of humor, with back story about Martha and her husband Will, and their courtship and Edna (the mother-in-law) and her husband's strong stance against their son moving so fast with the first person he connected with. How they got past that, and how they get to the point of cutting hair is deftly handled, and wonderfully told.
The new issue of Tin House (52, not currently visible on their website) has a plethora of great short stories and one of those is "The Full-Service Shelter" by Amy Hempel. Nearly every paragraph, and many second and third sentences within paragraphs, in the story begins "They knew me..." or "They knew us..." with the "they" in question being dogs that are at the full-service center.
They knew us as teh ones who got tetanus shots and rabies shots--the latter still a series but no longer in the stomach--and who closed the bites and gashes on our arms with Krazy glue--not the medical grade, but the kind you find at hardware stores--instead of going to the ER for stitches where we would have had to report the dog, who would then be put to death.
or
They knew us as the ones who argued the names assigned at Intake, saying, "Who will adopt a dog named Nixon?" And when Nixon's name was changed--changed to Dahmer--we raggedon them again, then just let it go when the final name assigned was O.G., Original Gangster. There was always a "Baby" on one of the wards so the staff could write on the kennel card, "No one puts Baby in the corner," and they finally stopped using "Precious" after a senior kennel worker said of a noble, aged Rottie, "I fucking hate this name, but this is a good dog."
These are examples of the writing to be found within the story. Hempel is very straightforward with her writing, allowing her narrator to assume what it was that the dogs in the shelter would notice of her and her working partner, based essentially on everything that she did and thought while working. Putting her own feelings and efforts into the thoughts of these dogs.
I found it to be an oddly strong story in how I was pulled from sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph--I couldn't stop myself if I had wanted to, but there wasn't some huge plot point dragging me forward, or any big character-development. There was something in the language and the way of allowing those other charcters to define the narrator, even though with her own voice, that kept my attention and interest.
And a quick side note--as one fascinated by Richard M. Nixon (I attribute this to a--he was fucking fascinating and b--he was probably on the television screen more than anybody the years I was three through six {1969-1972}), I actually did have a dog named Nixon--we found out he had been born the night Nixon died--how the hell could we NOT name him Nixon?
The title story from Stacy Bierlein's A Vacation on the Island of Ex-Boyfriends starts:
In three days we have played, cried, ran, fought, laughed, danced, and built fires with them all--every man we've ever wanted. We're exhausted.
The two women the story is about get sidetracked on their way to Nantucket and end up on an island where each of their entire list of former boyfriends is lined up along the beach. It's a fantastic scenario and Bierlein plays it out interestingly right on through to the end. Anna, the narrator, goes through her list chronologically, though is surprised by the inclusion of Michael--a man she had a 
one-night stand with--he was told by the person on the Ferry that brought eveybody to this special island that they'd apparently had an emotional connection.
Bierlein does a nice and subtle job of differentiating the two women and their personalities by describing the actions of their respective boyfriends on the islands--Anna's seem quiet and pretty introspective while Tammi's are louder, engaging with each other, and still trying to curry favor with each other.
The ending, having to do with Michael and Anna has Bierlein commenting, again with great nuance, about how both men and women view relationships, as well as how they communicate.
A full review of the entire collection is forthcoming here at the EWN--the half I've finished so far though has been great reading.
A guest post from the fantastic story writer, Noy Holland:
Joseph Cardinale's work is ambitious and humble, carefully composed and recklessly 
felt. His stories are infused with an intoxicating spiritual depth; his characters become exalted, irrational, gorgeously unpredictable. They want the impossible and the impossible happens. They believe in the possibilities of transformation, and they stand fast by their convictions. Here is a writer who seeks the transformative, who exults in the promise of language to deepen and complicate experience. "Any good book is an experiment in living," someone said. Joseph writes stories which relieve readers of the trivia of the world; his stories are invitations to compassion, aesthetic bliss. They are necessary, and, in their nimbleness, their intensity of feeling, thrilling to read.
--Noy Holland
author of Swim for the Little One First (forthcoming from FC2), What Begins with Bird, and The Spectacle of the Body
There are not hundreds of stories available to read by Aaron Burch, which seems odd for a guy that's been around during much of the internet explosion of literary journals, and for a guy that has been a fairly large part of that community. It seems to me though that what Burch has done, that maybe some other writers didn't do, was hold off before publishing. That is, it seems as if maybe he buried a lot of stories in his own personal locker somewhere, waiting until he was writing at the level he wanted others to be able to see before he began submitting.
I could be completely wrong about this--he may just have really started to write seriously three years ago and be publishing a high percentage of everything he's written. What I don't find though, when Googling his name, are stories that I find to be really slight versions of his better works.
"After the Leaving" can be found in the new issue of Unsaid and it's a story told in 39 short sections across ten pages. The tale has a Noah's Ark feel to it as there is a large item being built by a single person (at first) that seems to be a boat, and in fact ends up being one. There's also a current to futuristic feel though (as opposed to Noah's Ark times) as items that are used to make up this boat include many items from our own daily lives (computer monitors, tires, and the like).
What was "the Leaving?" The reader is never really told. The phrase "After the Leaving" is used a couple of times, but there's not really any explanation for what it was, or what life was like prior to that event. There are also frequent references to The Factory, where all men seem to be employed, though all seem to be working on their own, without much idea of what anybody else there is doing.
Burch has done a nice job of creating this world that is unfamiliar, while not being so unfamiliar so as to make it unapproachable by his readers. Much of what I note in the previous paragraph was hit upon in a great second section:
We hadn't been the same since the Leaving, since the silence came and cast a dark shadow over the town like a storm-front tht threatened but never happened. We worked together, all the men of the town, at the Factory, though not together--we traveled to work separately; had our own rooms and, presumably job tasks; left when we were done, no two of us at the same time. Not one of us at the factory knew what the others among us did. Nor did we much care.
There are just some great sentences in this story:
In the same manner, none among us now wants to admit any sense of doubt, about each how and why of the way things are, and the where of our current location or possible destination.
and
Prayers, we started calling them, unsure where we'd heard the word before, and we repeated the overheard words to each other and ourselves, hoping to recreate whatever their meaning might be.
This story fits well in Unsaid (not a surprise, David McLendon doesn't pic things that don't), showing just what level burch is writing at these days. You'll be happy if you pick up this journal, and this story by Aaron Burch will be one of the reasons why.
"Copper Top" originally appeared in an issue of New York Tyrant and now leads off Karl Taro Greenfeld's debut collection, NowTrends (Short Flight/Long Drive, 2011). It's an interesting selection to lead off a collection with its metafictional aspects, the narrtor's name is Karl Taro Greenfeld, who is a writer, with a wife and two daughters with the same name as the author's wife and two daughters.
The story begins simply enough, with Greenfeld carrying a jug of his own urine due to his doctor needing to perform more tests on Greenfeld having determined that his copper levels were off the charts:
When I asked what was normal, he said these numbers were off the chart.
That's just an expression, I told him.
No, he said. I am looking at a chart here, and those numbers are not on it, anywhere.
Greenfeld sneaks sly bits of humor such as this into the story sporadically. He 
also begins to very subtly foreshadow the fact that perhaps this additional copper is affecting Greenfeld more than he realizes, slowly allowing the reader in on facts that show this to be the case while doing so in a way that keeps the Greenfeld character in the dark.
The story is an excellent one and has me looking forward to reading the rest of the collection. While it has metafictional aspects to it, the story itself is straightforward, and interesting and very well done.
Just purchased direct from Press 53, Okla Elliott's collection, From the Crooked Timber. Some nice blurbs on this one from scads of writers: Thomas E. Kennedy, Jonathan Monroe, Franz Wright, Duff Brenna, Kelly Cherry, Lee Martin and Lee K. Abbott. I've only started peeking into this one but enjoying every bit that I've had a chance to take in so far--look for a post about a story or two before the month is over.
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Perhaps with the time you have left in May you could write a short short story along the lines of Hemingway's purported baby shoes tale. Something like "Aliens visit Florida; havoc at Disney."
A family member recognized the Hemingway reference. While I'd heard of the shoe short story, I didn't know the Hemingway connection.
Odd you should mention the aliens visiting Florida and causing havoc at Disney. Years ago, I was interested in sending the characters from my two Aliens books (http://www.gailgauthier.com/aliens-1.htm and http://www.gailgauthier.com/clubearth.htm) on a road trip to Orlando with their parents and an alien they'd picked up in their second book. However, I ran it by my publisher/editor first, and they weren't interested, so I wrote The Hero of Ticonderoga instead.