Short stories for a long weekend

Taft is ready.

Are you ready for a three day weekend? And by "ready" of course I mean "do you have enough books to read?" FYI: The Richmond Public Library will be closed on Monday, May 25th in observance of Memorial Day. We hope you have a safe and book-filled holiday weekend. Consider picking up some of these short story collections to read in between barbecues.

May is Short Story Month and Ellen, our blogger emeritus, has a little something to share from her reading list of the recently retired:

I'm not always sure what to make of "linked stories." Was the author trying to write a novel, but couldn't quite leave the comfort of her preferred medium? Developing a character he was particularly fond of? Sometimes the link is thematic, sometimes chronological, and sometimes so tenuous I'm not sure it's even there. But Charles Baxter was definitely on a mission when he wrote the stories that comprise "There's Something I Want You To Do." Ten stories, most of them set in Minneapolis, each with a title that suggests its theme: five named for virtues ("Bravery", "Loyalty", etc.) and five for sins ("Lust", "Sloth"). Each is written in a different voice (some of them better than others), from a different character's point of view, about different events and in different times. But dizzying connections run between the characters and the events, in addition to the central theme: what happens when someone asks something of you, and how your response affects your life and others'. The stories read well independently of one another, but you'll want to read them in one big gulp to fully grasp the links between their characters and enjoy the "Aha!" moments that come when least expected.

And then there are the nine stories all previously published elsewhere and collected in Jonathan Lethem's Lucky Alan and Other Stories. Their only link is that they all come from the same brilliant post-modernist mind, one that never does the same thing twice (as readers of his novels know), and which is afraid of nothing. The eponymous Alan of the title story is anything but lucky, his sad life recounted third-hand in a brassy New York slang. Two writing students pursue the reclusive author they idolize, "The King of Sentences," and face unexpected humiliation. "Procedure in Plain Air" is a Kafkaesque nightmare, made even more frightening by its close observation of the mundane. (It reminds me of George Saunders's "Semplica Girls Diaries" and if you've read "The Tenth of December" you definitely remember that story.) Cartoon characters are marooned on a desert island in "Their Back Pages." Lethem experiments in every story to different effect, but his humor and compassion for the human condition shine throughout.

From all of us: Congratulations, good luck, keep reading (and blogging!), Ellen!

In the spirit of the subject I will keep my two cents brief.

In Hall of Small Mammals, the debut collection by the young and talented Thomas Pierce, the stories begin and end in medias res (meaning "in the middle of things") leaving the reader to pause after each story to ponder his meaning. I can say there was something quite satisfying about the inconclusive conclusion to the first story, "Shirley Temple Three", the lonely tale of an ailing cloned miniature woolly mammoth and her reluctant host. And the guilty horror of the stories within a story in "Videos of People Falling Down" is worth checking this book out alone.

A little dark, a little funny, and a little touching, Pierce has fashioned a weird little world, not so unlike our own but slightly askew, as if we are posed incongruously in a museum as part of the taxidermy tea party implied in the cover art. That's the uneasy, giddy feeling experienced at the end of Pierce's stories: not dreamlike or surreal, but just to the left of real, perhaps frozen in an awkward state of undress.

Short stories are often creepy and fantastic, they feel experimental, as if the author is playing around with ideas, showing us all of the cool, weird things rattling around in her head. Kelly Link's fantastical, playfully dark Get in Trouble feels like this. Most of her characters are adolescents exploring adolescence in normal ways under strange circumstances. In "Summer People" Ophelia and Fran's forming friendship is funny and honest, as is their interaction with the mysterious supernatural world of the titular summer people. "The New Boyfriend" casts an eerie but humorous light on the romantic obsessions of a group of teenage girls.

A few more: Get your hands on Margaret Atwood's latest unputdownable story collection, Stone Mattress. The same goes for Dame Hilary Mantel's Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Amelia Gray's anatomy-themed collection Gutshot is sure to be deeply unsettling and just landed on library shelves.

BLOGtober Fest: Halloween Reading Tips from Edward Gorey

In 1959, Edward Gorey, surrealist, aesthete, and master of the unexplained and unexplainable, collected twelve of his favorite ghost stories for a volume called The Haunted Looking Glass. He had just left his job as art director for Anchor’s line of classic paperbacks, teaming with two others to republish a series of children’s works. In this short series, the Looking Glass Library, Gorey designed the covers for books like The Wizard of Oz and The War of the Worlds.

Though The Haunted Looking Glass does not contain a word written by Gorey, the entire book is nevertheless soaked through with Goreyness. The Edwardian rooms, the sudden visitations, the endings that don’t really end anything--one can recognize all these elements in classic Gorey works like The Doubtful Guest and The West Wing. Each story features a full-page illustration by Gorey in the style of his Anchor paperbacks. But perhaps most of all the reader benefits here from Gorey’s immense literary erudition. This was a man whose floors had begun to bow under the weight of his collected books. He is exactly the person you would want to ask, on a chill, October evening, on Halloween itself, “Do you know a good ghost story?”

The stories Gorey chose come mainly from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in what critics have called the golden age of the ghost story. They are almost more English than scary, their effect having more to do with atmosphere than out-and-out terror and their atmosphere having a lot to do with damp streets and too-quaint villages. Anglophiles will smile at sentences like, “The rain kept up a steady patter on the glass roof of the coffee room.” Anyone looking for a new and seasonal reading experience should follow Gorey’s advice and look up Algernon Blackwood, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, E. Nesbit, Bram Stoker, Tom Hood, W.W. Jacobs, and Wilkie Collins. Here are little descriptions of four of the stories to give you a fuller picture:

“August Heat” by W.F. Harvey (1885-1937)

This is the shortest piece in the book and a great place to start. An artist spends the morning tapping his pencil, searching for a subject, before drawing, inexplicably, the figure of a fat man in court, accused of a terrible crime. After his work, and again inexplicably, the artist goes for a walk, where he finds a man “sitting with his back towards me, busy at work on a slab of curiously veined marble.” Who is this man? What has he carved into the marble? The story is so short I can’t say anything more without spoiling it.

“The Visitor from Down Under” by L.P. Hartley (1895-1972)

A man rearrives in London after time in Australia and retires to his favorite hotel, where, alone in the dining room, he chats with the waiter, Clutsam. They talk about the law, about how society might punish a criminal, and about how the dead might do the work society can’t. Later that night, the waiters are roused by a man in a cloak requesting a bed. Most chilling sentence: “The pillow with its fivefold perforation was the first object on which Clutsam noticed bloodstains.”

“The Thirteenth Tree” by R.H. Malden (1879-1951)

“The Thirteenth Tree” is as a story about houses, which ones look nice, which ones don’t, which ones have bizarre and intricate histories. It’s a story about the rooms inside houses: “completely lined with well-filled bookcases whose contents looked as if they would repay examination.” And a story about the gardens outside houses, which become like stages for the past to play itself out again before the present.

“Casting the Runes” by M.R. James (1862-1936)

Malden dedicated his book of ghost stories to M.R. James, still considered to be the master of this branch of horror writing. “Casting the Runes” takes place in academic circles, amidst backstabbing and jealousy. For historians, good ones or bad, the past never truly dies. Image most likely to linger in your brain: “And this poor boy was followed, and at last pursued and overtaken, and either torn in pieces or somehow made away with, by a horrible hopping creature in white, which you saw first dodging about among the trees, and gradually it appeared more and more plainly.”

Short stories for a long weekend

Hurry up and get your supplies today for the long weekend!  The library will be closed on Monday, May 27th in observance of Memorial Day.

Inspired by this postage stamp story, I thought I would suggest some of my favorite short reads for the long weekend ahead.

Though it appears to be entirely apocryphal, I still love the tale of how Hemingway allegedly won a bet by producing a story in 6 words: For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.  (Or something to that effect.  That’s the beauty of urban legends: they are so mutable.)  

Heckuva way to win a bar tab, sir.

Also along those lines is another favorite of mine, this time attributed to science fiction writer Frederic Brown:  The last man on earth sat alone in a room.  There was a knock on the door...

Always gives me chills, that one does.

That is the beauty of short stories, no?  They pull no punches.  They can leave the reader gasping in so few words. So here's a heap of some that have moved me in one way or another, in no particular order:

The Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka

Revenge by Yoko Ogawa

A Good Man is Hard to Find 

by Flannery O’Connor

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

The Heart of Happy Hollow
by Paul Laurence Dunbar

Welcome to the Monkeyhouse

by Kurt Vonnegut

The Works of Edgar Allen Poe