Tag: Short Story Collection

  • A Question for the People Who Read My Short Story Reviews

    For those of you who read my short story reviews, and I guess anybody else out there for that matter, are there any short stories that came out in the last six months from either big or small publications, that you would recommend?

    Please leave your suggestions in the comments so we can all enjoy your endorsements.

    Thanks for taking part…

  • Short Story Review: “Smoke” by Nicola Winstanley

    (The short story “Smoke” is part of Nicola Winstanley’s short story collection, which is entitled SMOKE.)

    I took a writing class, long time ago, and the professor pronounced to us on day one, that “Your characters are your babies. And if you want to be a good writer, you have to make your babies suffer.” He was a bit dramatic, but academically, his was correct; characters have to be knocked down to make their eventually rise have any dramatic or cathartic weight. This is not a revolutionary idea, as its just essential to storytelling.

    Nicola Winstanley isn’t afraid to make her characters suffer. In her title story, “Smoke,” she allows the nine-year old Amanda to suffer, but also shows us the suffering of her family, and how each of their own pain affects and inflicts on the others. As the story begins, children are being called home for supper by their mothers, but Amanda’s mother has recently passed away, so no one is calling for her. At home, her older sister Judy, dealing with the loss in her own detached way, instructs Amanda to make herself a dinner of toast, as that is all the food in the house that their father has left for them. They tell themselves that their father is still at work and will be home soon. Eventually, he does come home, but its late, the children should be in bed, and he seems aloof to how to take care of two daughters, let alone himself. What follows is a story about a family dealing with grief, but the focus is on Amanda and her wrestling and discovery of the emotions she is experiencing – as for a nine-year-old, these emotions are just beyond her ability to articulate and understand them, but her feelings are strong enough to engage her to action.

    At times I felt that this story was brutal in its honesty. Amanda at first believes that her mother has just gone away, as if there was a chance for her return, but Amanda’s actions betray this belief of hers. Winstanley marvelously illustrates how Amanda does everything in her power to keep the loneness and the emptiness within her at bay, but Amanda is a child, and handles these complex feelings as a child would – playing with a friend, eating sweets, hiding from her sister, and waiting for her father to return. All for not, as slowly it dawns on Amanda that she is alone.

    The other touch that I enjoyed with this story was how the other two family members dealt with their own grief. Judy’s reaction is to leave this home, and stay with a friend’s family. Maybe Judy is saving herself, finding a way to survive this situation, but to do that she has to abandon her sister. And then there is their father, who’s way of coping is to not be in the home, which clearly no longer feels like a home. Though the story never goes into detail what is keeping their father away, it’s a question that I never felt needs to be answer. No, he is looking out for himself as well, because Winstanley drops an illuminating point, by observing that while the girls are going without, he has time to get new glasses for himself.  From this point, Amanda begins to spiral down, and it is painful to watch. She doesn’t have clean or good fitting clothes. There isn’t enough to eat, and she goes to school hungry, and without a lunch. She finds some sympathy with other children, but she also finds unwanted attention from the local teenagers.

    And here the story takes a turn, in a direction I wasn’t fully expecting; Amanda tries to find her way out of where she’s at. Maybe she doesn’t fully understand why she’s doing it, but we know. The need to sleep in the same bed with her father. The attempts to clean their home. Amanda tries to eat better, and be better. Amanda doesn’t give up, she tries, she fights for security, and to keep the loneness away.

    With the end of the story, and the reconciliation between Amanda and her father, I felt that these characters were now seeing each other, acknowledging that they need to and can do better. But… but there is a melancholy to this ending. The damage has been done. The trauma has been created. These few days of this story might be some of the most impactful days of her life. I felt that at the conclusion of this story, I knew Amanda would be okay, but it would be a journey where she would have to deal with her feelings of abandonment, neglect, food anxiety, authority figures, and shame. There was such a hopeful melancholy with this story, that I just felt crushed by a feeling of compassion for these characters.

    It wasn’t the reaction I was expecting, but as the days went on after reading this story, I kept thinking about Amanda, and how this story very quietly illuminated the exact moment in this person’s life where they stopped seeing the world as a child does, and started taking the first steps toward understanding the world of adulthood.

    Nicola Winstanley made her baby suffer. Yet, Amanda came out on the other end. It was hard at times reading certain passages, and not because something shockingly brutal happened. No, difficult to read because I know that those little indignities that happen in childhood, those are the deepest cuts that take a lifetime to deal with. Maybe I would prefer to be the kid eating sweets, trying to ignore that pain deep down. Nicola Winstanley had the courage to confront that pain, and let Amanda start her healing.

  • Personal Review: Let Me Think by J. Robert Lennon

    I am embarrassed to say that I have no idea how Let Me Think by J Robert Lennon made it on my reading list. And my reading list is actually a wish list on my Amazon account. This was the book that was next up. I knew it was a collection of short stories, but other than that, I knew nothing about the author or any previous works. I was going in blind, but sometimes it’s good to be surprised.

    The collection is made up of flash pieces and short stories, broken up into five sections. There are two reoccurring stories; one about a marriage, and another about a cottage in the woods. The other thing that reoccurs in the collection is the theme of unhappy marriages. And I can’t prove it, but with the book being broken into five parts, I had the weird feeling that each section was to represent one of the five stages of grief. Again, no proof of that, but I couldn’t shake that idea.

    I liked Lennon’s writing right from the beginning of the collection. The first two pieces, “Girls” followed by “Boys” showed that Lennon has a sense of humor, and likes to play with the form of a short story. Witty, this guy’s witty, and the sense of playfulness and fun comes right through. That’s not to say that the none of the stories take on a serious tone, as some do, but experimentation is happening here as well. The “cottage” stories do take on an adult tone, but they also lean into a slight thread of absurdism, or maybe fanciful is the better word to use. Yet, the best example of this tone is the story “Subject Verb” which is told in that very simple sentence structure; just a subject and a verb. It is a format that is brutal in its simplicity, but Lennon makes it an effective tool for storytelling.

    In the end, the collection was enjoyable and entertaining, but what I was left with, and made me the happiest, was that this was a book by a writer who is trying to find new ways to tell a story. The pieces don’t follow the hero cycle, or have a hook in the first line, or even try to tie up the narrative with a button. Now, some of the stories do the afore mentioned things, but the ones that don’t, the stories that try, and poke and prod at what a narrative can be – how short can a story be – how many words are needed to create an emotional pay off? THAT was the excitement of reading this collection – it was different, and it was refreshing without feeling labored to be different.

  • Personal Review: Five Tuesdays in Winter, by Lily King

    (I will be SPOILING this book.)

    I’ve been heavy into reading novels of late, and as such, I thought I should take a turn and read a story collection. I received Five Tuesdays in Winter, by Lily King, as a Christmas gift. It was selected off a book list that I have, which I add to whenever I hear about a title that sounds interesting. Sadly, I don’t remember where I heard about Five Tuesdays in Winter, which spurned me to add it to the list, but for whatever reason it got there, I am glad.

    It was a nice, easy book to read, and I feel like if you describe any book in that matter, it comes across as patronizing. It’s as if seriousness, authenticity, and drama has to be heavy, labored, and challenging to a reader. If I didn’t have responsibilities and a child to look after, I think I could have finished this book in a day, and not missed a beat of King’s writing.

    The collection is made up of ten stories, which feels like the proper number in a collection, or songs on an album. All the stories were good, and, not surprising, some were better than others. The collection starts off with a Murder’s Row of five compelling stories; “Creature,” “Five Tuesdays in Winter,” “When in the Dordogne,” “North Sea,” and “Timeline.” Then there is a lull with “Hotel Seattle,” and “Waiting for Charlie,” which are the two weakest of the stories. Then the final three pieces, “Mansard,” South,” and “The Man at the Door” are all solid works, and help the collection end on a strong note.

    King does an excellent job of getting to the point, describing what needs to be known, and not wasting words. I could not only see, but feel the flowers in the front of the house Carol grew up in, and was still owned by her rehab prone father in “Creature.” But, I also appreciated the way that King allowed the character’s actions to speak, indicating their emotions to us, showing us what was motivating them. This was most evident in the title track, “Five Tuesdays in Winter,” where conversation adverse Mitchell’s growing infatuation is revealed only through his slight observations and gestures.

    And what I really enjoyed, and felt encouraged by, is that there was nothing shocking for the sake of shock, or life and death in these stories. For the most part, I found that the compelling drama of each story was more about discovery in a personal truth, or the acknowledgment of a change in the direction of one’s life had occurred. In solid, confident hands, like King’s, these moments are profound in their apparent simplicity; discovering the capacity of love again, or having the strength to stand up for one’s self, or that summer when adulthood emerged from adolescence, or my favorite – you have to have the courage to slay your fear. (Maybe even bury it in the back yard.)

    It was refreshing to read stories that had big truths in small packages. I have been reading so many short stories of late, that I am beginning to get desensitized to the amount of death, or uncomfortable/aggressive sex that happens. It’s like the “trauma plot” in stories has become the issue du jour of late. In Five Tuesdays in Winter, Lily King shows real courage in creating her characters that live lives of grace and dignity which not only shows she respects her characters, but also acknowledges that her characters will continue to grow in these worlds. This collection left me feeling surprisingly optimistic about life, which is a delight to experience in the cold gloom of winter.

  • Personal Review: One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories by B.J. Novak

    I had received One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories by B.J. Novak as a Christmas present back when it came out a couple of years ago. Friends had recommended it to me, saying that this is a really funny book that I’d love. So, I have kept it close to me on my night stand over the years. It even moved cross country with me, but I never got past the reading the first few stories. Not because they were bad, or that they weren’t funny. Just, something would come up, I’d put the book down, and then time would pass before I would pick it up and try again.

    I made a promise to myself that this year I would get back to reading as much as I can, and I am up to about a book a month now. (Last year I read two books, and this year I should complete twelve. That number might not be something to brag about, but it is a vast improvement from the year before.) I am also trying to clean out my huge back log of books that I bought or received and never read. Hence how One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories got back in the rotation.

    I read through it pretty fast, and I appreciated that many of the 64 stories were short; two or three pages. The writing was impressively efficient, both in storytelling and humor. There weren’t crap sentences filling the space, everything felt like it was there for a reason. It made me feel that Novak was very seriously not trying to waste my time while making me laugh. That’s not to say that he didn’t have longer stories, or jokes that had huge set ups, but in both cases, they landed.

    There was one minor issue that had had with this book. It was the final story, “J.C. Audetat, Translator of Don Quixote.” There is nothing wrong with the story, so to speak. It’s a longer piece, that isn’t knee slapping hilarious, but it is very witty and which makes a fine point. The issue I have is its placement in the collect, as the last story. (I am aware that “Discussion Questions” is the last piece, but that is more of a running gag, and not a complete story.) For a book that had so many, for lack of a better word, laugh out loud funny stories, I found the choice to end with an “internal acknowledgement of wit” type of story rather than choosing a story that would garner an external involuntary laugh, odd. Maybe the choice was made because “Translator” was the longest story in the collection, and that seems to be the unwritten rule of short story books; you end with the longest one.

    It’s a minor complaint, and I enjoyed the running gags between stories, and the sense that I was being included in a very funny ride.

    With someone as talented as Novak is at writing stories, I wonder is why he hasn’t written more books? I know he did the “Book with No Pictures” as we have that one in our house, and my daughter loves it. And not too long ago he wrote and directed the movie Vengeance, So I guess he’s been busy. It would be nice to see another collection is all.

    (Okay, we all know how this works. I am in need of “likes” and “shares” and “comments” and followers. If you enjoyed what you have read here, then if you could, please, do one of those four things. I appreciate it. Thanks.)