The Woman with the Bouquet by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt. From what century did this charming writer emerge? His gothically-romantic but also penetratingly realistic depictions remind me of Dickens, Maupassant, and Victor Hugo, as well as the landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and Johan Christian Dahl, wherein a human scene of huge impact is played out against an even larger background of grandiose nature. And so the characters of Schmitt's stories play out their own scenes of love, desire, jealousy, and despair against the larger background of rich atmosphere. As powerful as the backgrounds are, the human scenes are big enough to capture and hold attention, as Schmitt's characters deal passionately with life, and find reasons both irrational and irrefutably sane, for doing what they do, wanting what they want, and dreaming what they dream.
The Book of Right and
Wrong by Matt Debenham. These stories are absolute gems of truth about the fragility and the resilience of the human heart, in all its ages and incarnations. Debenham presents luminescent briefings of specific turning points in lives so real and so engaging that my own life felt transformed -- illuminated -- by the changes wrought in the lives of the characters. Whether writing from the viewpoint of a boy, a grown woman or man, an ex-con or an ex-husband or an abandoned wife, Debenham's voice is authentic, moving, and clear. The turning-points he writes about are turn-on-a-dime moments when a startling realization is made and the character is set on new path leading to a conclusion that is both surprising and completely believable, whether it be revenge, reversal, or acceptance.
The Laws of Evening
by Mary Yukari Waters. These stories are perfect renderings of those
crucial but often fleeting moments when both life's beauty and its
brevity are recognized. The stories are seamless, creating almost a
novel about an extended Japanese family branching out through time and
place. The stories range in setting from the days before World War II,
to the difficult years of the war and the years after, and coming up to
the present time, to a modern Japan still in touch with the old ways of
the alleys, the shrines, and the rituals. Waters' characters have
faced crises but the stories don't deal with the crises: they deal with
the aftermath, the survival, the facing of mortality not with fear but
instead with gratitude, or regret, or simple acceptance.
Burning Bright by Ron Rash. These stories go back to the Civil War, through to the Depression and on across the years to today, with the common elements of location -- all are set in Appalachia -- and struggle. Whether it be to survive as a Lincolnite (Union-supporter) in Confederate territory, to withstand the grinding poverty of the Depression, to return from the Korean war and renew roots, or to hold together a family amidst the disintegration caused by meth addiction, job loss, or medical debts, Rash's characters rely on gritty fortitude, shadowed compassion, and a bone deep alliance to the land and the people they came from to carry on, day to day. The stories are moving portraits of endurance, intuition, and grace.
Rancho Weirdoby Laura Chester. These short stories are wonderfully weird, original, fresh, and as sharp as broken glass, sending off flashes of light that beam understanding, sympathy and grace. I laughed out loud during the first stories and by the final installments, with the mood moving steadily towards the dark, I cried. Chester is an artist with words and images, wielding both her stories and her readers with ease: we bend as she curves the world, and our perceptions of it, around us.
Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro. The characters in the five stories contained in this collection want to be the right person for the job, to answer the needs of the people (acquantainces, wives, agents, friends, memory of a mother) making demands all around them, and to bring some gratification, some pleasure, somewhere. Rarely do they please themselves, but that is life, both in Ishiguro's stories and in the real world. Learning to live with dreams that have not quite come true, with loves that do not answer all needs, with the injustice of how life's rewards and punishments are meted out, is learning to live, period. And in Ishiguro's stories, the lesson is learned through moments of pain, of grace, and of laugh-out-loud chaos.
Say You're One of Themby Uwem Akpan. These stories are about the young victims of Africa's worst conflicts, victims too young to escape, and too guileless to hide. They are children who trust the adults around them, even when the facts of their situations scream deception, impotence, and hopelessness. And when these children assume the guilt for their pain, rather than admit to the complete failure of the adults, their stories become a tragedy and a travesty of childhood. But Akpan's stories are not just sad stories nor are they meant to undercut the hope and trust of children as weak or unrealistic, luxuries they must be shorn of to survive. In fact, it is the hope and the trust of these very real characters that give us faith in their resilience. It is their trust and hope that, ironically, may just save them, although it can never erase for them the history of their abuse at the hands of incompetent adults, power-hungry leaders, bloodthirsty religious fanatics, and money-driven mercenaries.
The Callingby Mary Gray Hughes.
The magic of Hughes' story-telling is in the details: she knows that
life is understood not in the big picture but in the pieces that make
up a life, in the moments of connection or loss, of beauty or sorrow,
and of surprise or redundancy. Hughes gets every detail in her stories
just right; she never glides or glosses over the surface of her
characters and their situation, she goes deep into their selves and
into their surroundings, bringing up the details that will ensure our
understanding. With her careful and exact imagery, period and
place-perfect dialogue, and sharp observation of human nature unsullied
by sentimentality, Hughes creates stories that rich, true to life, and
hypnotic.
For Grace Received by Valeria Parrella. Luminous and powerful, Parella's stories are lined with steel, fired with energy, and pulsing with life. The grace she writes about is the grace that occurs in the mix of vulnerability and superlativity, in that place where the daily meets the extraordinary. She write well about men but it is her female characters that electrify. Parella captures the essence of what it is like to be a woman, the twisting and sometimes choking, sometimes saving, lines of compassion, desperation, and joy that encircle us. Parella writes beautifully (my highest regards for the translator, Antony Shugaar), with a precision that is not taut, but is free and encompassing, highly accurate and genuine.
The Darts of Cupid by Edith Templeton. These stories are lovely and lyrical, very funny and very sharp in their assessment and presentation of human nature, especially the matter of attraction and repulsion between the sexes. Templeton takers her time with her stories, allowing the plot to build slowly but keeping the style fast and even, full of intelligent writing and clever sentences that just sear with wit or truth or beauty. Her stories don't end with sweeping conclusions but with instead with true-to-life scenes about the natural (or forced) endings of things, of regret, loss, and sorrow, all tinged with the bit of happiness to have loved at all, for once.
The Thing Around Your Neck
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Adichie is
very good at creating quickly but with full depth of character, very real people
and putting them in viscerally-etched situations
that are immediate and dire (whether of life or of spirit). Although
she can easily portray either sex and all ages and classes, she is at
her very best in presenting women without wide choices but with the
quiet strength to make the most of what is offered. She celebrates the
endurance of women circumscribed by tradition or poverty or custom who
move beyond their defined places to find more for themselves and in
themselves.
The Nick Adams Stories by Ernest Hemingway. No one can write like Hemingway. He is able to combine the mental experience of reading together with a physical involvement with scene and character. The entire package of the Nick Adams stories is lovely, stirring, and genuine. After reading the last story, when Nick is riding with his son and reminiscing with his father, I turned back to the first few stories with Nick and his father, and the whole cycle really connected, made sense, and was very beautiful: I could see the influence of father on son, as well as the lasting impact of place on Nick, and the continuation of that influence and that memory of place on the next generation.
Where the Money Wentby Kevin Canty. This is a collection of brilliant stories, each one a perfect encapsulation of those quiet but momentous events when a life is turned around and inside out, or picked up, soothed, and set on the right track again. Canty's stories ride on an undercurrent of optimism against the odds, and the optimism is rewarded, maybe not with what was sought after but with a sudden clarity of vision: his characters don't necessarily get what they want but they do gain an understanding -- a slice of wisdom -- about life.
Salvation and Other Disasters
by Josip Novakovich. Novakovich uses humor and realism and even some
elements of fantasy to create wonderful and wildly imaginative but also
very real and compelling stories set against the grim backdrop of the
wars in the Balkans.He blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction;
his writing comes from his own life and from lives into which he's been
offered glimpses (and also deeper secrets) and he writes without
flinching about the truths of life, the beauty and the ugliness, the
moments of sweetness and the much less-than-sweet agonies.
Rome Noir,
edited by Chiara Stangalino and Maxim Jakubowski, Delhi Noir edited by Hirsh Sawheny, and Boston Noir edited by Dennis Lehane. The best noir tells the truth about the dark side of humanity and offers a talisman against that darkness through an intoxicating combination of crime and mystery and camp. The
stories set in Rome Noir are all written by Italian writers charged with
coming up with an original Noir story and there is not a weak
submission in the bunch. Every tool they use is true to the Noir genre:
setting ("the skeletons of unfinished buildings are also bones,
which someone will hasten to cover with the flesh of bricks, and then
fill in the spaces with wretched lives."); dialogue ("Sorry, Sweetheart, he stammers. Shut up, and take me home, she says."); and philosophical asides ("[It happened] the way everything happens...Little by little at first. Then all of a sudden.").
But they don't stop there, they go further, using Rome's history, its
present reality of tourists, crowds, crazy driving and crazier parking,
and its legends to create riveting stories. Delhi Noir bursts with people from every corner of India, every caste, every
ambition, and every ability; their stories reflect
the diversity and energy of Delhi, and of course, being noir, the
underbelly of ambition and ability, which is corruption, greed, abuse,
and vengeance. The stories seethe with corruption, bubble over with
greed, curdle with abuse, and boil with vengeance. And yet the
humanity -- the overbelly, if you will -- pulses throughout every story
as well. The stories in Boston Noir use the Catholicism of Boston, as well as its tides of gentrification, assimilation, and higher education, to create engaging stories about evil versus evil.
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe. These stories distill a nasty truth about what it takes to survive life when the journey starts with a leaky dinghy and the only tool offered is half an oar. His characters, borne out of the British working class, are survivors getting by on skills of alienation, disconnection, and resignation. There is no upward mobility for this underclass, there is only a kind of low grade and constant warfare against the self, and a unmitigated disdain for what is unreachable. The disdain is even at times militant but it is also a shield against any tender buds of longing that might try to take root in this most unfertile of soils, the slums of industrial towns. Sillitoe's characters have had nothing handed to them, they are not taking any bull from anybody, and they know only one thing for sure: they are from where they are from, and it is a place they will not relinquish for anything. These characters are not lesser characters for their resignation and alienation, nor for their rueful acknowledgment that what they have isn't enough. They are rich and deep, like the stories they find themselves in; stories that are neither pretty nor simple, but through the richness of the words and the deepness of what is conveyed, are life-affirming and beautiful.
Pastoraliaby George Saunder. This really funny and twistedly dark collection of stories is peoples with tortured characters. Life has not quite panned out
so well for them: they are the losers, the by-standers, the family
care-takers. And yet they hang in there, sure of a break eventually, or of
finding a new way of approaching an old problem, or of finding the
right woman or right job. That thread of optimism brings humanity to his characters, and that humanity, complex and genuine, is what gives Saunders' stories such charm. Darkly funny, utterly twisted, completely unpredictable, truly genuine, and deeply charming: it takes a great writer to do all that in a short story.
The Musical Illusionistby Alex Rose. Rose writes with precise undulations of imagination and intelligence, creating brilliantly invented but perfectly believable historical phenomena in his book The Musical Illusionist. Masquerading as a guide book to a subterranean museum called "The Library of Tangents", each chapter in this book describes a different exhibit in the library, all of which document advances and explorations in human thought and perception, lost now to mankind above-ground but still available to visitors to the library. For pure imagination and skill in writing (his sentences are perfectly timed, rich and satisfying, and his descriptions are mind-expanding), Rose cannot be beat; I ask only that he add in a heartbeat, some blood and heat, to create a living work that moves both brain and soul. Nevertheless, this is a collection well-worth reading.
Female Trouble by Antonya Nelson. Nelson's characters are authentic and compelling, living the best (or the worst) they can, harboring long-held dreams or getting over lost desires and hopes. Nelson writes unflinchingly, getting every story just right, the doubts, the regrets, and the joys of life. That's what she conveys so beautifully: the pleasure and the pain, and the effort to try again and maybe get it right next time: "Nothing to do but plunge on. Set the cruise control, lower the windows, raise the radio, stay between the broken yellow lines, and don't look back. No no no."
The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield. The short stories of Katherine Mansfield are perfect renderings of moments in life that seem simple and even mundane but turn out to be significant in their implications. In her stories, written quietly and without any sentimentality or overstatement, we see the truths of the world: all lives are painfully rich; fulfillment is just at the tips of our fingers or has passed by long ago; anticipation is the joy of life but also agony; and our desires and our loves are imperfect, impossible, and necessary.
Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan. Keegan writes perfect compositions of people and place (both are characters in her stories), setting them against brilliantly evoked and unique moments in time. Keegan's characters are neither saints nor sinners but people struggling to find some truth in the way they live their lives. A priest in love with a woman, a brother unable to protect his sister, a woman who marries because another offer might not come, a woman who takes over the house of her dead ex-lover and who exorcises more than his ghost from the windswept place and finding redemption in the respect, fear, and even love of the neighbors. Strange people in strange places and yet they all seemed so familiar: Keegan makes them real with her lyrical but straightforward story-telling.
Iron Balloons: Hit Fiction From Jamaica's Calabash Writer's Workshop, edited by Colin Channer. There are real gems of story telling in this collection, and all of the stories are good. What they share is the ambience they exert, a distinctly Jamaican mix of family and church, duty and pleasure; the stories express the flourishing of these traits, sometimes at odds and sometimes in complete harmony and rolling rhythm.
Twice-Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne's wonderful and charming stories are vivid with American history, rich in complex characters and compelling plots, and universal in the struggles presented, such as the anticipation of destiny, the role of free will, and the determination of what is important in life, what should be valued and fought for, and protected.
I Love Dollars by Zhu Wen. The title says it all: the love of money is rampant in China and everything and anything can be bought and sold. The stories of Zhu Wen are riotous and honest, freewheeling and relentless. Wen catches the humor in everyday life, and the pathos. Life in China seems consumed by a frantic search for money and sex, one inextricably linked to the other and he makes the search seem like a Keystone Cop adventure of ups and downs (mostly downs).
The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories. Gilman's stories are clever and original in character and plot, and utterly convincing in setting and atmosphere. Her sentences and structure are so clean and cut so neat, her descriptions so original, grasping the essential quality of the thing described, and her sensibilities are liberal and open. The underlying messages of freedom and happiness and respect co-existing in marriage and in society are uplifting and even inspiring without being moralistic or heavy-handed in any way. She is fun to read (except when she is absolutely chilling to read and then she is even better), easy to cheer on, and hard to put down.
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