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Short Story Collections for Non Short Story Readers

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It feels like there’s been a lot of talk lately about short stories. With Alice Munro winning the Nobel Prize and the sad passing of incomprable short story author Mavis Gallant, perhaps the short story is due for its 15 minutes in the media. But maybe we can extend those 15 minutes. The short story is not merely a shorter novel, the reasons for writing them are different as is the enjoyment to be found from reading them.

Short stories: you can pick them up, read one before bed, on transit, in waiting rooms. Sometimes a short, self-contained story can be exactly what you’re looking for.

In case you don’t know where to start with short stories, here are a couple suggestions:

 

If you’re looking for gimlet-eyed social observation, the public and private absurdities of life, dramatic irony, and enduring half-cracked love, look no further than Lorrie Moore. A heartrending mash-up of the tragic and the laugh-out-loud is her hallmark.

In “Debarking,” a newly divorced man tries to keep his wits about him as the United States prepares to invade Iraq, and against this ominous moment, we see–in all its irresistible hilarity and darkness–the perils of divorce and what can follow in its wake… . In “Foes,” a political argument goes grotesquely awry as the events of 9/11 unexpectedly manifest at a fund-raising dinner in Georgetown… . In “The Juniper Tree,” a teacher, visited by the ghost of her recently deceased friend, is forced to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in a kind of nightmare reunion… . And in “Wings,” we watch the unraveling of two once-hopeful musicians who neither held fast to their dreams nor struck out along other paths as Moore deftly depicts the intricacies of dead ends and the workings of regret.

 

If playful humor, a deep heart, a sharp eye, an inquisitive mind, and a writer with a fierce devotion to the entertainment of the reader sounds more like you, try B.J. Novak‘s One More Thing.

 

A boy wins a $100,000 prize in a box of Frosted Flakes—only to discover that claiming the winnings might unravel his family. A woman sets out to seduce motivational speaker Tony Robbins—turning for help to the famed motivator himself. A new arrival in Heaven, overwhelmed with options, procrastinates over a long-ago promise to visit his grandmother. We meet Sophia, the first artificially intelligent being capable of love, who falls for a man who might not be ready for it himself; a vengeance-minded hare, obsessed with scoring a rematch against the tortoise who ruined his life; and post-college friends who try to figure out how to host an intervention in the era of Facebook.  Along the way, we learn why wearing a red T-shirt every day is the key to finding love, how February got its name, and why the stock market is sometimes just … down.

 

Perhaps you’re most interested in reading the essence of a life in brief but spacious and timeless stories, if so, Alice Munro is the short story author for you.

Alice Munro illumines the moment a life is shaped – the moment a dream, or sex, or perhaps a simple twist of fate turns a person out of his or her accustomed path and into another way of being. Suffused with Munro’s clarity of vision and her unparalleled gift for storytelling, these stories (set in the world Munro has made her own: the countryside and towns around Lake Huron) about departures and beginnings, accidents, dangers, and homecomings both virtual and real, paint a vivid and lasting portrait of how strange, dangerous, and extraordinary the ordinary life can be.

 

If you like wry humour paired with penetrating insights, give Mavis Gallant a try. Michelle Dean writes over at Flavourwire that “Gallant was documenting the practice of young people drafting lives in cities long before Lena Dunham was a sparkle in anyone’s eye.”

Set in Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, the nine stories in this glittering collection reflect on the foibles and dilemmas of human relationships. An English family goes to the south of France for the sake of the father’s health, and to get away from an England of rationing and poverty. A displaced person turned French soldier in Algeria now makes a living as an actor in Paris. A group of selfish English expatriates on the Italian Riviera are incredulous that Mussolini and the Germans may affect their lives. A great writer’s quiet widow blossoms in widowhood, to the surprise and alarm of her children, who send a ten-year-old grandson to Switzerland to keep her company one Christmas.

 

Maybe George Saunders is your short story spirit animal. His stories are unsettling, insightful, and hilarious. Through their manic energy, their focus on what is redeemable in human beings, and their generosity of spirit, they not only entertain and delight; they fulfill Chekhov’s dictum that art should “prepare us for tenderness.”

In the taut opener, “Victory Lap,” a boy witnesses the attempted abduction of the girl next door and is faced with a harrowing choice: Does he ignore what he sees, or override years of smothering advice from his parents and act? In “Home,” a combat-damaged soldier moves back in with his mother and struggles to reconcile the world he left with the one to which he has returned. And in the title story, a stunning meditation on imagination, memory, and loss, a middle-aged cancer patient walks into the woods to commit suicide, only to encounter a troubled young boy who, over the course of a fateful morning, gives the dying man a final chance to recall who he really is. A hapless, deluded owner of an antiques store; two mothers struggling to do the right thing; a teenage girl whose idealism is challenged by a brutal brush with reality; a man tormented by a series of pharmaceutical experiments that force him to lust, to love, to kill—the unforgettable characters that populate the pages of Tenth of December are vividly and lovingly infused with Saunders’s signature blend of exuberant prose, deep humanity, and stylistic innovation.

For those who prefer their fiction with a dash of magical realism and fantastical characters, look no farther than Karen Russell.

Within these pages, a community of girls held captive in a Japanese silk factory slowly transmute into human silkworms and plot revolution; a group of boys stumble upon a mutilated scarecrow that bears an uncanny resemblance to a missing classmate that they used to torment; a family’s disastrous quest for land in the American West has grave consequences; and in the marvelous title story, two vampires in a sun-drenched lemon grove try to slake their thirst for blood and come to terms with their immortal relationship.

The post Short Story Collections for Non Short Story Readers appeared first on Retreat by Random House.


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