BOOK REVIEW: The News From Dublin by Colm Tóibín

I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence this review.

I don’t read many short story collections (which is what I say whenever I review a short story collection.) However, I’m addicted to Colm Tóibín, so when I saw this collection on Netgalley, The News From Dublin, I had to request it.

Everything Tóibín writes is extraordinary, with deep dives into the characters’ psyches and beautiful prose. There are nine stories in the collection, set in different time periods and different countries. Like all short stories, there are no happy endings and they are much more character driven than plot driven. Tóibín is able to make even unsympathetic characters compelling (The Free Man). I highly recommend the book for the first 8 stories.

The only one that didn’t captivate me was the final story, The Catalan Girls, about a family of Catalan sisters who emigrate to Argentina to make new lives for themselves. They were not close. In fact, they didn’t like one another and their mother only cared for one of them–not the protagonist. That story seemed to drag, maybe in part because it was novella length rather than short story length, but maybe the wandering through life was the point.

Short story fans should not miss The News From Dublin.

BOOK REVIEW: Where Kindness Lives: A Women's Fiction Anthology

If you'd like to take a deep dive into kindness this holiday season, try this collection of short stories. Nine women's fiction writers present tales of warmth, connection, love, and most of all, kindness.

BOOK REVIEW: Asylum Piece by Anna Kavan

I’m on a mission to read more “forgotten” women authors of the 1920s through 50s. (Like Nancy Hale and Maude Hutchins.) I just finished a short story collection by Anna Kavan called Asylum Piece. 

Anna Kavan (a pen name) was a British writer whose works were “nouveau roman”, semi-autobiographical, and difficult to categorize. She suffered from a difficult family life, depression, and heroin addiction. After a number of hospitalizations and suicide attempts, she eventually died from a heroin overdose. It’s a tragic life for a woman of enormous talent.

Asylum Piece is a dark, surreal collection of stories written from a first person viewpoint, a voice tinged with paranoia, delusions, and a painful loneliness. The stories are captivating, beautiful, and terrifying. The viewpoint characters (who generally seem to be the same woman, progressing in her madness) all imbue their tales with a sense of impending doom that is all the more frightening for being vague. Some are set within the asylum, and the desperation of the woman (and in one case, a man) abandoned there is gut-wrenching. What makes the work so powerful is the realism of the surrealism. In the character’s head, the goings-on are very real. 

Originally published in 1940, the book was re-released in 1972 and in 2001, so used copies are not hard to find. (I found it in my public library.) It’s well worth reading!

BOOK REVIEW: So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan

Claire Keegan is a marvelous writer. Years ago, I was awed by her novella, Small Things Like These. Recently, while on vacation, browsing in an indie bookstore, I came upon her collection of three short stories, So Late in the Day. And while I’m not particularly fond of short stories, I bought the book.

The three stories are So Late in the Day, The Long and Painful Death, and Antarctica. Each of these examines relationships between men and women, and finds in them a solid core of misogyny. There are no happy endings, but that seems to be true in all short fiction.

So Late in the Day traces a day in the life of Cathal, an Irish office-worker of some kind. As he goes through the motions, it becomes clear that this day is not unfolding the way it had been planned. He recalls, bitterly, spitefully, a relationship with a Frenchwoman who is no longer in his life. The reader may be tempted to have sympathy for him as the story begins, but by the end, it is clear that the woman dodged a bullet. Cathal deserves his miserable-ever-after ending.

In The Long and Painful Death, a thirty-nine year old woman who has been unlucky in love arrives at the home of a famous author who it seems has bequeathed his house to be a retreat for other writers. She is anticipating two weeks of writing and relaxation. But her space is invaded by an embittered German man who seems to feel entitled to the house himself. She puts up with his rudeness and intrusiveness until she can’t take it anymore and puts him out. She gets her revenge by writing him into her quite unpleasant story.

And Antarctica follows a young married woman on a sexual spree. Leaving her husband and children at home while she goes on a “shopping trip,” she bar hops and flirts with a stranger, then goes home with him. She spends a couple days in drunken abandon, enjoying her sexual freedom with a perfect-for-this partner. Until it goes awry in a ghastly fashion. Her punishment is on a Biblical scale.

The stories are all beautifully constructed and written, but they are also all disturbing in their own way.

BOOK REVIEW: Feisty Deeds: Historical Fictions of Daring Women (multi-authored)

 I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence this review.

Feisty Deeds: Historical Fictions of Daring Women is a multi-authored collection of 23 short stories featuring fictional women throughout history, from medieval times to the 1970s. It’s not a book that I can sit and read cover-to-cover, but it’s great fun to dip into. Pick a theme (Gambling with the Unknown; Dangerous Deeds; Moral Combat; or Defying Domestic Authority) and enjoy! There is something here for everyone!

BOOK REVIEW: Natural History by Andrea Barrett

A year ago, I read Andrea Barrett’s wonderful collection of interwoven short stories, Archangel. Her new collection, Natural History, is similar in style and content, combining rich character development with an eye for the beauty of the natural world. There are six stories. In one way or another, each incorporates Henrietta Atkins, an early twentieth century naturalist who taught school in a small town in northern New York state.

Henrietta leads a quiet life, but her influence nevertheless extends beyond the schoolroom into the lives of the inhabitants of her town and beyond. She chooses to remain single, but family is very important to her and she devotes much of her time to helping raise (and shape) her nieces. To some degree, this prevents her from making a name for herself in the larger world the way that her science-minded friend Daphne does. But Henrietta does not seem discontented with her choices. Her life is well-lived. People remember her. And women in succeeding generations echo her.

Woven into these short stories are explorations of science and technology, revealing the astounding changes that took place over this relatively short period of a few generations.

The characters are remarkably complex. The stories raise questions about their interactions and motivations. Some of these are answered but others are left for the reader to ponder.

Barrett is able to blend her fictional characters into real places and allows them to mingle with real historical figures. You’ll find yourself carried back to a time where the world was at the cusp of something new. A timeless heroine like Henrietta Atkins forms a bridge between old ideas and new ones. 

BOOK REVIEW: Old Babes in the Wood by Margaret Atwood

I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence this review.

I’ve been reading some more short story collections lately. How did I not know Margaret Atwood was a short story writer? Her latest collection is Old Babes in the Wood.

This is a moving collection of short stories focused primarily on themes of aging, memory, and loss. Whether you find the protagonists insightful, a little crotchety, or a bit of both will depend upon your perspective, but the truths that emerge in the course of the tales will make you stop and think.

The stories are varied, but Atwood returns to a focus on Nell and Tig, an older couple, happily married for many years who have had good, full lives by most standards, and are now faced with the inevitable. It’s heart-wrenching without being melodramatic.

This is a beautiful collection – as would be expected from this author.

BOOK REVIEW: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders

Have you ever wanted to go back to college and take a literature class? Maybe one on short stories? How about one on classic Russian short stories, for example, works by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol? If so, I highly recommend George Saunders’ book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. (Subtitled In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life.)

Based on a class that Saunders (the author of Lincoln in the Bardo) teaches at Syracuse University, the book presents a series of classic short stories and then demonstrates how they can be read critically to extract more meaning. Saunders discusses how short stories are constructed and why the writer may have made the decisions he did. It’s a fascinating way to look inside a literature course as well as to read and appreciate some great classic short fiction.

Saunders writes engagingly and encouragingly, making these Russian masters more approachable. A highly recommended reading experience.

BOOK REVIEW: The Archivists: Stories by Daphne Kalotay

 I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence this review.

Whenever I review short stories, I start off with the disclaimer that I don’t usually read short stories. But recently, I’ve been delving into more of them, so I was pleased to be able to review The Archivists: Stories by Daphne Kalotay.

This is a thoughtful collection of stories dealing with life-changing events and moments in largely realistic contemporary settings. (There is a hint of the magical or surreal in a few, but mostly, they are realistic.) The stories have varied settings and do not interlink, but deal with everything from reactions to the pandemic to a second date where one must eat egg in aspic.

The characters are deftly portrayed and I found myself emotionally invested in each of the stories despite the brevity. They are beautifully written, dealing primarily with complex relationships. They are moving rather than depressing. 

The book is recommended for short story fans and for those who dip into the literary form only occasionally.

BOOK REVIEW: Archangel by Andrea Barrett

Historical fiction and short stories don’t generally go together in my mind. When I think of historical fiction, I think of detailed world-building, big-event settings, and large casts of characters. However, Andrea Barrett’s Archangel surprised me. In her collection of interconnected short stories set in the early 1900s, Barrett is able to create intense, poignant vignettes featuring several characters whose lives are caught up with the new discoveries being made in science and natural history. They deal with difficult life situations while grappling with new understandings that displace the comfort of the familiar. Scientific theories permeate their lives and they draw connections between scientific endeavors (engineering, astronomy, biology, genetics, and medicine) and their own life experiences.

The reader is firmly drawn into the time and place of each short story. The details bring the world to life. The writing is beautiful. And the characters are sympathetic and realistic.

I loved the book and will have to look for more of Barrett’s work.

BOOK REVIEW: Rural Voices: 15 Authors Challenge Assumptions About Small-Town America, ed. by Nora Shalaway Carpenter

 I don’t read many short story collections but made an exception for Rural Voices: 15 Authors Challenge Assumptions About Small-Town America.

This thoughtful collection, edited by Nora Shalaway Carpenter, shows slices of rural young adult life through short stories (prose and graphic art), poetry, and essays. They show the diversity, optimism, and love of place felt by young people living in small communities hours from big cities. The main message is that rural Americans are not stereotypes.

While targeted towards teens and young adults, the audience should not be limited to younger age groups. It’s a reassuring look into the minds of the next generation.

BOOK REVIEW: The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

Our history/historical fiction book club is meeting soon and chose The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, an amazing book that I read in one sitting, wrenching me out of my reading slump.

The book is fiction, but written as an intertwining collection of short stories with a "memoir-like" feel to it, even though it jumps from one point of view to another. The primary narrator is a Vietnam veteran named Tim O’Brien, who has a squishy relationship to the author because it is fiction, not really memoir or autobiography. This gives the whole narrative a real but unreal tone, which meshes with the narrator’s ruminations on the telling of war stories and how-impossible- it-is-to-get-at-the-truth-but-it’s-all-true. It has an immediate feel, even when a character is looking back, and an honest feeling whether or not it’s true.

Each chapter is a story in itself, anecdotes about a company of soldiers in Vietnam. Reminiscent in a way of All Quiet on the Western Front, these are very young men who don’t really have a "big picture" view of the war, who are focused on personal survival and the survival of their buddies. It shows the awfulness of war: its tedium, terror, discomfort, dehumanization, guilt, and ongoing trauma, as well as the closeness of the interpersonal bonds and the giddiness that comes with surviving.

The writing is beautifully stark and evocative. The characters, though presented in snapshots, end up fully realized.

Even for those who don’t think they would be interested in Vietnam War fiction (I didn’t think I would be), this book is a should-read.

BOOK REVIEW: A New England Nun by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman was a very popular "regionalist" author in the late 19^th century, writing short stories and novels set in small town New England. They deal with domestic situations and the subdued romances of the times and place.

A New England Nun and Other Stories is one of her best known collections. In the title story and in others, she explores the idea of spinsterhood, showing that the strong, self-sufficient women are not to be pitied. Other stories look at marriage, at sibling relationships, and at error and redemption. The settings give a wonderful sense of the homes, streets, shops, and farms. Her characters represent the stoic, warm but reserved old New England stock. Like most short story collections, you won’t find many happy endings, but the stories are poignant rather than tragic.

I don’t often read short story collections, but chose this one for the Back-to-the-Classics challenge. I’m glad I did. Mary Wilkins Freeman is a master of the art and deserves her revival, (which has occurred thanks to feminist re-evaluation of her work.)

BOOK REVIEW: Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer

My book group chose a short story collection for our next book: Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer. Some of her stories have appeared in The New Yorker and Harpers and have won awards, so this young writer is well-respected in the genre. And her writing is distinctive and edgy, with angsty characters in situations fraught with emotional and sometimes physical peril. If you’re a fan of short stories, this is a collection worth reading.

However, I think I’m just not much of a short story fan. Rather than depressing slices of life, I like more meat on the bones of a plot and time for characters to grow and develop. This is beautifully written, but in the end, that isn’t enough for me. There’s too much angst without resolution. The common theme seems to be things are not going to get better for any of the characters no matter what, and that’s not great incentive to read on.

BOOK REVIEW: The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan

A week or so ago, I read a review in the New York Times  that made me do something I haven’t done in quite awhile. I pre-ordered a book from Amazon. (The book was due to be released in just a few days.) Oddly, it was a book of short stories and essays, which is not my usual reading fare. And, stranger still, even though I’ve been in a bit of a reading slump lately, I ignored the stack of soon-to-be-due library books awaiting me, opened the box from Amazon, and sat down and read.

The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan is a moving collection from a startlingly talented young writer.

Her short stories deal with a variety of topics from young love to the life of a contractor in Iraq’s Green Zone to the drawn-out last days of doomed researchers in a sunk submarine. I think the best ones are those whose protagonists are young adults in the throes of first love with all its passionate intensity, confusion, and disillusionment, but her skill in exploring human emotion is evident throughout. The essays are beautiful, and range from exploring how she (or more precisely, her mother) deals with her diagnosis of celiac disease to recounting a day spent in the company of an exterminator. She displays an admirable empathy for her subjects and a mature self-awareness. At the same time, she is young and she knows it. She accepts her youth as the gift that it is as she stands on the brink of graduation from Yale and the next phase of her life.

Marina Keegan had already begun receiving accolades for her writing. She had a post-graduation job lined up at the New Yorker. And then, five days after graduation, she died in a car crash. The material for the book was compiled by friends and family with help from Anne Fadiman, who was Marina’s instructor and mentor at Yale. More details about this remarkable young woman’s life are available in the introduction and online. However, her parents have said Marina wouldn’t want people reading her work just because she’s dead. She’d want people reading the book because she had something to say. So should I mention the biography? How relevant is it? It doesn’t really matter whether I mention it or not, because it’s pretty impossible to read the book without being clued in to its backstory. But knowing about the tragedy does, subtly or profoundly, change the reading experience.

Woven throughout some of the stories are a rather morbid preoccupation with death. In one story, the protagonist’s not-quite boyfriend has just suddenly died. In another, stranded submarine occupants await eventual death in total darkness. In her essays, although she celebrates her youth, she makes mention at times of things she will do before she dies or as she is about to die. It all seems so very prescient, but of course, it isn’t. Just as when she writes about herself and her peers having so much time to explore options and change their minds, or when she writes about her own future, a some-day pregnancy, it leaves the reader with a hollowed-out feeling. This girl was just bursting with life, with hope, with promise–with all that grand expectation and invincibility that comes with youth. The writing stands on its own, and yet, the emotional impact is greater—the reader is necessarily impacted—by knowing that the author died shortly after writing the words.

Marina Keegan urged her fellow students not to settle for after-graduation jobs where they would forget about their passions, their ideals. The sentiments are inspiring and expressed with all the enviable enthusiasm and lack of cynicism of someone who still seemed to see the world’s most insurmountable problem as the eventual burning out of the sun. (And even that, she believed, could be gotten around with some ingenuity.) For herself, Marina wanted to beat the odds and be a writer—a challenge that could well seem, to today’s young writers, to be more impossible than engineering a solution to the death of the sun. The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories shows that Marina was up to that challenge. She was a writer. Don’t read the book because she’s dead. Read it because it’s wonderful.

BOOK REVIEW: Nikolai Gogol. The Collected Stories

I’m getting nervous about my last two challenges. Time is growing short. Some of the back-to-the-classics challenge books are optional, but I still have to read my required pre-18th century or 18^th century choice-The Odyssey. Unfortunately, my son has to read it for school, so he has first dibs on the book. Why didn’t I read that one first?

In the meantime, I decided to read my choice for classic short stories: Nikolai Gogol- The Collected Stories. I bought this collection about four years ago (after reading The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri which mentioned Gogol’s The Overcoat prominently). But it’s been collecting dust. I’m not much one for short stories.

Gogol is a Ukranian-born Russian writer who lived in the early 1800s. I’m no student of Russian literature, so all I’ve learned about him is taken from the book’s introduction. His earlier stories are influenced by Ukranian folklore and the later stories are more sophisticated but absurd. He had a great deal of influence over other Russian writers. None of this intro prepared me to love this book as much as I did.

What are these stories? Possibly the best known are The Nose; The Overcoat; and maybe The Madman’s Diary, which were included in this collection. His earlier books were Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, Vols I and II, and included in this collection from those books were St. John’s Eve and Christmas Eve. There were a total of thirteen stories in the collection, a mixture of earlier and later stories. And they were all captivating. There were similarities in them, but there was a difference in tone between the earlier stories and the later ones. Actually, I enjoyed the earlier ones more.

The "folklore-ish" tales were conversational in style. And even though the narrator wandered around in tangents, he was a fantastic storyteller, always drawing me in with the wild details. There were witches and devils galore, so maybe it was a kind of magical realism, but it was like nothing I’ve read before. Not so much scary as matter-of-fact, as though how do you live with these things if these things are real, and they scare you, but you go on with your life because they are part of life.

The middle portion of the book had stories that were vignettes of Russian countryfolk’s lives, humorously and sadly portrayed. One story that I thought was brilliantly done started with a chatty narrator complaining about his memory being like a sieve. He heard a wonderful story from a great storyteller, so he insisted the man write the story down. Awhile later, he noticed that his wife had used some of the pages to wrap cakes. So- if you want to know the ending of the story, you have to find the storyteller. The narrator gives great detail on where to locate the storyteller and how to recognize him. Then he launches into the story. It’s a detailed and increasingly interesting little family drama. I KNOW that the ending of the story is going to be lopped off. Nevertheless, I continue reading. I get sucked in to the dilemma. I want to know how the conflict is going to be resolved. And when the tale ends abruptly, leaving me hanging, I have no one to blame but myself. Who would DO that to a reader?

The Overcoat is the last story in the collection. It’s a sad story about a downtrodden clerk, content-even happy- in his job, but poor. It comes to pass that he needs a new coat. He scrimps and saves and plots with a tailor friend to have a new coat made. The thrill of the new coat becomes the focus of his life and when it is finally finished, it opens a whole new world of possibilities for him. Except that the first evening he wears it, the coat is stolen. When he attempts to seek help from the authorities, he is ignored and ridiculed. He sickens and dies. His ghost takes a sort of muted revenge. The bare bones outline doesn’t do the story justice. Gogol’s writing is able to wring every last bit of feeling from it.

I’d love to read the stories again in an annotated version to help extract more of the meaning from them, because I was reading quickly just to enjoy the stories and the beauty of the words on the page. But I’m sure there are layers upon layers in there. One of these days, when I’m not running in so many different directions, I’m going to pull Gogol back down from my shelf.

You can check out all the classics being read by many different bloggers at the back-to-the-classics challenge hosted by Sarah Reads Too Much.

BOOK REVIEW: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

For some reason, right around the holidays, I always seem to read a book (or books) that pack an emotional wallop. Maybe it’s because I usually have a couple days off work so I feel I can tackle something engrossing. Maybe with all the holiday cheer I feel armed against depressing fiction. This year, I picked up my Back to the Classics award winner – Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. This book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2008. I bought the book soon after, and it has been sitting on my shelf ever since.

Olive Kitteridge is not a novel, not exactly. It’s a collection of short stories centered around Olive and her family and friends, solid New Englanders, inhabitants of a small town somewhere in coastal Maine. Olive is middle-aged to elderly over the course of the book. A retired school teacher, she is not the main character in most of the stories, but somehow or another, she figures into them all. We see her from many different points of view, and eventually we get a very good picture of the woman. She is exceptionally three-dimensional. (I know that doesn't actually make sense, but it will if you read the book.) In some of the stories she is hard and unlikeable and in others, achingly vulnerable. Remarkably, in these short stories, you not only end up feeling that you know Olive inside and out, but you also become very well acquainted with a fair number of her acquaintances. The insights into human nature (as demonstrated in the examples of the friends and family) are that good.

The writing is Pulitzer Prize caliber. Every detail is perfect. Every interaction is exquisite. Strout is able to capture a wide spectrum of interpersonal relationships in all their joy, pain, confusion, love, and inevitable loss. The book was, at the same time, emotionally draining and emotionally rewarding.

So my Back to the Classics Challenge is off to a wonderful start. I can’t recommend this book highly enough!

BOOK REVIEW: squirrel seeks chipmunk by David Sedaris

I hadn’t ever read anything by David Sedaris and I thought I should remedy that. The problem was which book to read. Then I heard about "squirrel seeks chipmunk." Aesop’s fables for the twenty-first century. I made my choice.

In this collection of stories (that can be devoured in a sitting) Sedaris uses animals to show what is wrong with humans. This is not a unique idea but Sedaris puts a new spin on it, and the fables definitely have a modern tone. Squirrels date chipmunks, mice raise snakes, one lab rat tries to tell another that the only thing wrong with him is his attitude... With stories like these, he mocks the moral failings that are most recognizable today. There are sixteen tales in this bestiary. The messages are not subtle but they are cleverly represented. Sedaris has a reputation for the humor of his writing, but I found these stories too brutal to truly be funny. Clever, yes. Entertaining, certainly. But too painfully harsh to make me laugh.

From this intro to Sedaris, I can see why his writing has received so much acclaim. The voice is strong and it’s impossible not to be affected by what you are reading. So now the problem is which of his books to read next.