Short Stories

Short reviews of recent short story collections

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Published: Jun 27, 2007

• No One Belongs Here More Than You
• Twenty Grand: And Other Tales of Love and Money
• Next Stop Hollywood: Short Stories Bound for the Screen
• A Thousand Deaths
• Russian Lover and Other Stories
• The O. Henry Prize Stories 2007
  
• Throw Like A Girl
• Male of the Species

By Miranda July
Scribner Press, 201 pp., $23

For a debut collection of stories, Miranda July's No One Belongs Here More Than You is remarkably well developed. Perhaps it's because she's been telling these stories for over a decade � in the performances, music, short films and the feature (Me and You and Everyone We Know) � that brought her from indie obscurity to indie stardom.

This book, nonetheless, shows July doing what she does best: searching in the most unlikely places for an elusive truth.

July has a gift for finding beauty in the mundane. In her hands, the awkward, secretly desperate and often half-realized interactions that make up our daily lives take on new transcendent possibilities, opening us up to a world of momentary joy. Barriers of age, class and language are built up only to collapse at the least likely moment, revealing the mediated nature of our relationships. The imaginary stands side by side with the real. A woman teaches swimming lessons on her kitchen floor. A man falls in love with his friend's fictitious sister. A conversation with a child about his made-up pet dog leads to a life-changing breakthrough.

All of these stories are written in the first-person, and that falsely autobiographical "I" pulls the reader (the "you" of the title) into the fray with everyone else. Nothing sets these characters apart from the rest, except perhaps their shared penchant for fantasy. In July's final analysis, the only thing extraordinary is the creative act, and these stories reveal it at its fullest and its best.

�Mary Wilson

By Rebecca Curtis
Harper Perennial, 272 pp., $13.95

If Rebecca Curtis isn't careful, she'll give New Hampshire a reputation as a place of bleakness, solitude and menace. Of course, any rep might be a step up for such a vanilla-bean state, and one advantage of setting all of Twenty Grand there is that it's a blank slate waiting to get scribbled on. And so if she tells us it's the place where her characters run uninsured alpine slides or go on tragic post-prom boat rides, or trees turn into monsters and eat children, well, damned if we know enough to argue. A bunch of these stories are absurd headscratchers, yanking the puppet strings this way and that with unreliable narrators telling cockeyed near-allegories. A wolf chases a woman home from work, except this is the kind of wolf that drives a car and pushes doors in. Is it a metaphor? Fuck if I know, but it better be, since it's not a very convincing wolf. Such shakycam fables are smartly kept short; Curtis gets more mileage in the real world, or a reasonable facsimile, where the monsters might be unattractive men who proposition the female narrators, or attractive ones who don't. But Curtis, who leads her narratives lovingly, tenderly, doesn't employ human beings for outright villainy. And sometimes the antagonist is just bad, bad luck. When a desperately hard-up mother unknowingly tosses away a valuable coin at a toll booth, it hits you swift and hard, a spectacular, bloodless moment of horror. Buy this book. Never, ever go to New Hampshire.

�Patrick Rapa

Edited by Steve Cohen
St. Martin's Press, 352 pp., $14.59

Ever leave the multiplex wondering which moronic Hollywood exec decided to greenlight such a waste of film? Turns out there are good materials out there, waiting to make it to the big screen � and that's what editor Steve Cohen delivers with Next Stop Hollywood, a collection of short stories that deserve to end up in a theater near you. Cohen, who co-founded the organization of the same name, has managed to round up a focus group of 60 "movie-buff readers" and an editorial board of "Hollywood insiders" in his search for the Next Big (Short) Story. Only 15 out of the thousands of solicited stories made the cut, running the gamut from Disney feel-good movie-of-the-year to R-rated renegade cop flicks. Read with your mind bent towards casting and you'll find a couple of John Cusack courtroom dramas, a few Morgan Freeman thrillers and a Julia Roberts/Meryl Streep tearjerker all waiting for the go-ahead. Standing by themselves, these stories are unlikely to catch the eye of, say, a New York Times Book Review critic; but as a collection of straight-to-production stories, they are fast-paced, captivating and, most importantly, they leave plenty of room for the imagination. President Bush and pedophiliac Catholic priests may make cameos here and there, but the only political commentaries that sneak by are ones easily digestible with your popcorn and Diet Dr. Pepper. Sure, for 15 bucks you could go see Pirates again, but everyone knows that the trailers are the best part of going to the movies and in Next Stop Hollywood, you get fifteen of them. Now that's entertainment.

�Mickey Jou

By George Alec Effinger
Golden Gryphon, 343 pp., $24.95

An author reusing an old character isn't always a sign of laziness, take Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout, for one. For another, take New Orleans science fiction writer George Alec Effinger's Sandor Courane. A Thousand Deaths is a posthumous collection of Courane stories; Effinger died in 2002, and true to the title it's full of stories where Sandor dies in a variety of inventive ways.

The collection begins with the novel-length "Wolves of Memory," wherein the hapless Courane is exiled to an alien world for displeasing TECT, the computer that controls the world. Courane's crime is failing at the jobs the supposedly infallible computer picked for him, including as a sci-fi writer. Unfortunately for Courane a fatal neurological disease strikes all of the exiles, which destroys their memory but gives Effinger a good basis to explore issues of memory, identity, freedom, complacency and responsibility.

Often Effinger sneaks autobiographical elements into Courane's character; he usually appears as a sci-fi writer with bad luck mirroring the author's medical and financial troubles. With "In the Wings" Effinger literally delves into his own head, depicting various recurring characters waiting around a locker room until called on to star in a new story. They criticize Effinger's writing, insult one another and amusingly bitch about their jobs as sci-fi characters.

The only weak story is "From the Desk of" which is predictable and highly derivative of John Varley's classic novella Press Enter, which predated Effinger's story by two years.

Both Effinger's wit and cynicism are on display in A Thousand Deaths, proving that he deserves at least some of the attention that other guy who reused a character gets.

�Will Dean

By Jana Martin
Yeti/Verse Chorus Press, 224 pp., $15.95

In the title story from Jana Martin's debut collection � and the first book published by the makers of the revered Yeti zine � a young divorcée settles in to compose a letter to her former mother-in-law. Through several drafts, she lets her mind and mood wander from sorry (about hurling serving dishes at the wall at Christmas dinner) to not-quite-over-it (does mom know her son's a cheating, passionless asshole?) to kinda over it (an affair with the half-Jamaican hunk down the hall is good medicine). When it's not slyly funny � she encloses a check to cover the cost of cleaning gravy off of the wallpaper � "Russian Lover" is gutpunchingly painful, written from a place of genuine heartbreak. That story alone is worth the price of admission, but Martin has a few more tricks. One story's arranged like definitions but reads like word association; another is so clipped you can practically hear the clock ticking between each sentence fragment. Most of the protagonists are sharp but snakebitten women: strippers, junkies, a dominatrix-in-training, sufferers of unknown and comical ailments. Precise, succinct language keeps the reader in the moment and unprepared for a subtle evolution into the fantastic. In other words: You buy it long before you know you're being sold something. But not so much because Martin's a sweet talker; with prose so forthright and deliberate it's easy to believe you're in the hands of a straight shooter. That's what makes it so surprising, so captivating, when you suddenly realize she's been pulling a fast one on you.

�Patrick Rapa

Edited by Laura Furman
Anchor, 384 pp., $14.95

Let's get the suspense out of the way right now: This year's edition of the O. Henry Prize Stories, perennial champions since 1919, is once again awesome. (One could argue The Best American Short Stories series is more reliable or respectable. One should not argue just to hear one's own voice.) Of course, it's not hard to field a winner with everybody � not just The New Yorker and McSweeney's but every publisher of short fiction in the U.S. and Canada � vying for a spot on the roster. There are familiar names, like William Trevor (of course) and Alice Munro (so consistently marvelous I suspect they simply choose the shortest when assembling these things). But some of the greater thrills come from the bigger mysteries, like Jan Ellison, whose first published short story earned a spot. Eclectic in tone if not in form � no experimental hippie commie beatnik ultra-mod shite here! � the collection is remarkable more for where it goes than how it gets there. Andrew Foster Altschul's entry is set within the confines of a battered women's shelter and the head of a security guard working there. Eddie Chuculate leads an adventure across the magnificent pre-colonial American Gulf Coast, where white men are still just omens and Indians do something they almost never do in fiction � go for a joyride. These are the moments when the series really shines, really puts forth the best the form has to offer.

�Patrick Rapa

By Jean Thompson
Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 304 pp., $13

The back cover of Jean Thompson's Throw Like A Girl promises the "secrets of womanhood" with a dash of Girl Power. And secrets there certainly are in this collection of twelve short stories, as nearly every female protagonist you encounter is a murderer, adulterer or emotionally damaged product of a dysfunctional family. With Thompson's cold, observational tone, it's hard to tell whether these stories are meant to celebrate the strength of womanhood. On the one hand, these are tales of daughters who try to survive abandonment, of mothers who endure fruitless motherhood and of desperate housewives (and girlfriends) who have sex with the wrong man just to prove a point. On the other hand, these are also some of the most hopelessly immature and undeniably self-absorbed women you will ever meet outside of Seattle Grace. Luckily, Thompson has her ways of holding the reader's attention, so that in spite of any rising desire to tell these pouty women to stop whining and grow a spine, readers are able to follow their stories to the end, when (surprisingly yet believably) these women do stop whining. They take stock of their selfishness and mature, realizing the possibilities of being human outside of snagging men and having sex. As the stories progress from the tragedy of selfish desperation to the liberating acts of baking pies and throwing rocks at a bad boyfriend, we become dimly aware of Thompson's point all along: In a mad world such as ours, what's a girl to do?

�Mickey Jou

By Alex Mindt
Delphinium, 239 pp., $22.95

A book-length rumination on American masculinity? You gotta tread carefully, son, or most of your sentences will start with "my dad" and end with "newfound respect mired in disillusionment" or some such maudlin thing. No sweat, Alex Mindt is up to it. Elaborately and caringly designed, his characters are often fathers and sons indebted to/in awe of/exasperated/embarrassed by each other. They're modern everymen, maybe, a dentist, a horticulturist, an Elvis impersonator, a widower. They live in Vegas, Vermont, California. Their motivations are sometimes mysterious but human, rarely ambitious or pernicious. Although he's got an eye for fresh and memorable oddballs � like the young African-American artist who burns crosses on his own lawn � Mindt is particularly effective when he subverts some archetypal scenarios. His reworking of the dad-takes-son-on-first-hunting-trip yarn unravels with gentle revelations and slow realizations. A West Texas science teacher is pressured to pass the dumb star quarterback, but the plot, narrated by his cheating wife, gets tangled before you can yawn at its familiarity. Still, the sublime resolution � and there are quite a few of them in Male of the Species � is dramatic, believable and humble. That's Mindt in his wheelhouse, leading with his brain, not his balls.

�Patrick Rapa

 

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