The Sunday Salon and Tell Me a Story... Short Story Collections

When I was a kid, I loved bedtime stories! I still love them now, but they take the form of a different genre... Short Stories. Sometimes you just don't have time to invest in a full length novel, but you hunger to read all the same.

There are many great writers who love writing short stories. Ray Bradbury is famous for writing a short story every day. William Sydney Porter, also known as O'Henry, was such a beloved short story writer that there is an award in his name, the O'Henry Award. Who hasn't read Edgar Allen Poe or Washington Irving, both wonderful short story writers, during the month of October? Alice Munro even won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and she ONLY writes short stories.

Where to find some great short stories? Here are 3 newly published collections that may satisfy that late night snack called reading...

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher by Hilary Mantel... Penetrating characterization, unsparing eye, and rascally intelligence are fully on display in this collection of stories. Mantel's classic wicked humor in each story—which range from a ghost story to a vampire story to near-memoir to mini-sagas of family and social fracture—brilliantly unsettles the reader in that unmistakably Mantel way. Mantel brutally and acutely writes about gender, marriage, class, family, and sex, cutting to the core of human experience. Unpredictable, diverse, and even shockingly unexpected, each story grabs you by the throat within a couple of sentences.

Hilary Mantel has won numerous literary awards, including 2 Man Booker Prizes, and now offers us up some of that great writing in smaller tidbits. This has gotten a lot of great press and I have put it on my TBR list! 

Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood... A recently widowed fantasy writer is guided through a stormy winter evening by the voice of her late husband. An elderly lady with Charles Bonnet’s syndrome comes to terms with the little people she keeps seeing, while a newly-formed populist group gathers to burn down her retirement residence. A woman born with a genetic abnormality is mistaken for a vampire. And a crime committed long-ago is revenged in the Arctic via a 1.9 billion year old stromatalite. In these nine tales, Margaret Atwood ventures into the shadowland earlier explored by fabulists and concoctors of dark yarns such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Daphne du Maurier and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Margaret Atwood, famous for her speculative fiction (that's kind of like science fiction without all the interstellar travel) gives us a sampling of her writing with her take on short stories. No stranger to short stories, these stories from Margaret Atwood should prove satisfying as always. Another book on my wish list!

What Happened Here, a novella & stories by Bonnie ZoBell...  A  wildly different cast of characters living on the same block in North Park, San Diego, site of the PSA Flight 182 crash in 1978. The crash is history, but its legacy seeps in the stories of the neighborhood’s inhabitants, bringing grief, anxiety, and rebellion to the surface and eventually assists in burning clean the lives of those who live in the shadow of disaster. Amidst the pathos of contemporary life, humor flits through these stories like the macaws that have taken to the trees of North Park. The birds ensure that there’s never a dull moment in the neighborhood, and their outrageous colors and noisome squawks serve as constant reminds of regrowth.

I was excited to receive this short story collection to review because the stories sounded so grounded. Stories about real people dealing with real situations. The reviews for this book have been wonderful and Bonnie ZoBell, even though she is not a household name (yet), has won numerous accolades and awards for her writing. I'm looking forward to cracking the spine on Bonnie's collection of stories and will be reviewing it soon!

So, do you read short stories? I know a lot of readers who don't, because they feel that these collections are not "real" books. I don't prefer short stories, but it is a nice escape. Any recommendations for our short story reading?! Let me know what some of your favorite short stories are! In the meantime...

Happy reading... Suzanne

The Tenth of December by George Saunders… A Review

Satire is irony, it's sarcasm, it's George Saunders, who wrote Tenth of December. This book of short stories, Tenth of December, is filled with the ironies of everyday life, sometimes existing in a futuristic world, and a wry sense of humor. Not everything is humorous in Tenth of December, but George Saunders has an incredible gift of language that makes for some great reading even in the wake of some disturbing narrative.

The short story itself needs to be a taunt, never veering without purpose, kind of writing. A good short story needs to takes us from A to Z in a brief period of time without wasting words, and George Saunders is a master of that. These stories in his newest collection, pack an emotional punch, almost slapping, with their sometimes gritty, urban settings and stripped down humanity. But you can see the truth in what he writes and appreciate the honesty in the way he writes it.

In Tenth of December we meet Kyle, who's parents have created a kind of pacifist and who now must make a choice to abandon what they drilled into him to save the life of the little girl next door. Two Mothers who are similar, yet not; A shop owner who fantasizes about making that one decision that will make his life perfect; And a criminal who volunteers for pharmaceutical testing only to have it create a battle with his moral character, that "they" created in him. And even a maintenance kid in a Medieval Times job who aspires to move up the ladder to make life better for his family, but witnesses something that changes those plans. In all there are ten stories, all with their own special quality.

My Thoughts… Tenth of December is a great collection of stories. At first I was struggling with reading these stories. I wasn't "getting it" or why the author was lauded for being the reincarnation of Mark Twain. I watched George Saunders give a talk at Google about his writing. I liked him; I liked the passage he was reading from this book. Then I realized that my normal reading definitely wasn't satire, and I had to take a breather from the literary fiction I was reading to give Tenth of December a chance. And it worked. In each of these stories, George Saunders gets to the heart of his characters, no matter how flawed they are, to show us what makes us human. I laughed, I felt pain, I felt sadness.

Favorite stories? The Semplica Girl Diaries, My Chivalric Fiasco, and Tenth of December.

If short stories are something you've wanted to try and you enjoy good satire, Tenth of December by George Saunders is a great choice. I really enjoyed the time I spent in George's world. ..

About the Author…

"I was born in Amarillo, Texas, grew up in Chicago, and (barely) graduated from the Colorado School of Mines with a degree in exploration geophysics.  There was an oil-boom on, which meant that even someone like me could get work in the oil-fields.  So after college I went to work in Sumatra, as a field geophysicist.  We worked four weeks on and two weeks off, in a jungle camp that was a forty-minute helicopter ride to the nearest town – so this is when my reading life really started.  The game became filling up an entire suitcase with books sufficient to get me through the next two weeks of camp life.  About a year and a half at this job, I got sick after going swimming in a river that was polluted with monkey shit (I remember looking up at about 200 of them, sitting on our oil pipeline crapping away, and thinking: “I wonder if swimming here is okay?”) and came home to try and be Kerouac II.  I worked as a doorman, a roofer, a convenience store clerk, and a slaughterhouse worker (a “knuckle-puller,” to be exact), and all of this contributed to my understanding of capitalism as a benign-looking thing that, as Terry Eagleton says, “plunders the sensuality of the body.

I’d always been interested in reading, ever since a nun I was secretly in love with turned me on to “Johnny Tremaine” in third grade.  But I’d never met a writer and so it took me awhile to realize that a person could actually write for a living."

*P.S. Want to read one of his stories? You can get a sampling of his writing at openculture.com, where you can read 10 of his stories! Including The Semplica Girl Diaries and Tenth of December.

Haruki Murakami fans are in for a treat...

Are you a fan of Haruki Murakami? Then you need to pick up this weeks The New Yorker Magazine!

Haruki Murakami writes fiction filled with bits of surrealism and humor; themes dealing with isolation and loneliness. And somehow he is able to open up his characters and show us parts of ourselves. His writing is wildly popular! Not only in Japan, his birth place, but all over the world. When there is something new written by Murakami, word spreads fast. A prime example of his popularity is his forthcoming book, IQ84, which was a novel published in three volumes in Japan between 2009 & 2010. The first printing sold out in one day, and sold one million copies in one month. We've been waiting in the U.S for the translation of the novel to come our way for over a year, but will finally have our chance to read it in October 2011.

What can we expect in The New Yorker Magazine? A short story, U.F.O. in Kushiro, written by Haruki Murakami that's described as "Short story about a Japanese man who attempts to piece together his reaction to his divorce by taking a trip north to bleak Hokkaido." Such a matter of fact group of words put together to describe something written by a writer that deceptively uses the everyday to surprise us with the unbelievable.

If you subscribe to The New Yorker, you can access U.F.O. in Kushiro from The New Yorker website via their digital online edition. If you don't subscribe, don't forget to pick up your March 28th, 2011 copy of The New Yorker where ever magazines are sold!

The Short Story Reading Challenge 2010

The Short Story Reading Challenge 2010

This past Sunday I posted about short stories, listed some great authors that have short story collections and wrote how I really wanted to make an effort to read more short stories. Fortunately there usually is a challenge for almost every occasion, and so I've signed up to participate in The Short Story Reading Challenge 2010. This is the perfect way to be encouraged to read more short stories! Here are the different ways you can participate...

Here are the Challenge Options:

Option 1:Simply commit to reading ten short stories by ten different authors over the course of 2010. If you're relatively new to reading short stories, any ten will do.

Option 2: If you’ve already got a lot of short stories under your belt, read ten short stories by ten writers whose work you have not yet read.

Options 3: Commit to reading between five and ten short story collections over the course of 2010. Again, if you're a short story novice, the world is your oyster as far as selection is concerned.

Option 4: If you're a seasoned short story reader, read between five and ten short story collections by writers whose short stories you have not yet encountered.

Option 5: This is the custom option which you can tailor your reading list to best meet your personal reading aspirations. You might wish to craft a short story reading list that focuses on a particular place, or era, or genre.

*In the words of Mavis Gallant, short story writer extraordinaire, she advises... Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait...

I am choosing Option 1, reading ten short stories by ten different authors! Two of the books I just picked up to complete part of this challenge are Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat, and Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro. I'm thinking of spending a leisurely afternoon at my local library and reading some more short story collections there... Interested in learning more? Head on over the The Short Story Reading Challenge Blog to learn more, signup, and to get some great reading suggestions from other participants!

I'll list here the stories I have read, the authors and the books that the stories are from and my thoughts on what I read, so check back every once in a while to see how it's going, (suggestions here are always welcome!) and to hopefully find some great suggestions from what I read! Good luck if you decide to participate! I look forward to having some fun discovering new authors!

Happy reading... Suzanne