short stories

Widow: Stories

mandy — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 08:00:00 +0000

The collection of stories in Michelle Latiolais’ Widow pull at a common thread – shading, sketching, and putting together a picture of what it is like to walk the Earth as a woman who has lost her husband. While none of these women carry any outward signs of trauma, the lens through which each of them sees the world has shifted, leaving each of them off-kilter. In many cases, the characters are left watching as life unfolds in slow motion before them, experiencing every excruciating detail with a painful clarity and the knowledge that this may not change.

Latiolais’ mastery of storytelling colors each story with a singular kind of grief, even as it offers playfulness, pain, humor, and history. The actions and thoughts of each character are imbued with meaning and weight beyond that of any casual activity. The reader is left with a sense that every choice the widows make has been somehow tagged by the death of her husband and is made in some effort to come to terms with this new view of the world.

The author walks the fine line between becoming morbid and being flippant amazingly well. Each story is told with a measure of respect and reverence, so as to engage the reader in the tale and draw out emotion without weighing so heavily that it is painful to read.

Widow is a book for anyone who has ever been in a loving relationship and felt the sting of separation. Above all, these are poignant stories of humanity, love, and life experience that ring true and leave the reader with a deeper understanding of love and loss.

Written by: Kari O'Driscoll, March 21st 2011

Best Bondage Erotica 2011

brittany — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel

Cleis Press

As the title would imply, this erotica anthology contains solely stories that involve bondage, the use of restraints for the purpose of sexual pleasure. Along with the use of bondage in sexual encounters comes the play of submissive and dominant roles. As one might expect, nearly half of stories in this book stick to standard dominate/submissive heterosexual roles, with men tying up women in various scenarios and then sexually dominating them. As a feminist with a lifelong interest in challenging gender roles, I found these stories to be a bit lackluster and predictable, though surely they might appeal to some readers. (To be clear, I'm not suggesting feminist beliefs necessarily negate interests or arousals derived from women in submissive sexual roles.) That said, the stories that I found to be the anthology’s gems did not pigeonhole men and women into clearly defined submissive and dominate roles.

Among the stories within the collection that I found to be most scintillating was “The Rainmaker” by Elizabeth Daniels, in which a married couple whose sex life is marred by the wife’s frigidity finds renewed fire with some BDSM play involving a gag and rope. Similarly, in Lux Zakari’s story “Truss Issues,” a heterosexual couple experiments with the use of restraint for the first time, and although the female is restrained it is her sexual needs that are fulfilled, rather than that of the male, as is the case with some of the other heterosexual stories in the collection.

I also liked “Reasoning” by Tenille Brown, in which a woman restrains and sexually dominates her male lover in an attempt to make amends over past transgressions. For less heteronormative narratives, I recommend “Bound Helen,” in which a lesbian couple’s use of corset by day is a precursor to their bondage play by night, and during which neither partner has complete control of the other. In “Daddy,” a lesbian couple takes the submissive and dominate roles to the extreme, with the plot’s apex centering around a trip to a party in which the submissive is blindfolded and restrained for the exploration of others.

While bondage as well as domination and submission are not sexual scenarios that will appeal to all readers, most fans of erotica will most likely find at least a few stories arousing. Those who find the subject matter more to be their cup of tea will surely find the anthology to be a gem. The most valuable attribute of this anthology is the high quality of writing in every story, scenes that are set well, and characters that are fully developed despite the short stories in which they appear. Those who enjoy books with more literary merit will surely value editor Rachel Kramer Bussel’s pattern of selecting well-written stories that sometimes trigger the intellect as well as the sex drive.

Written by: Adrienne Urbanski, February 15th 2011

Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry

mandy — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Christine Sneed

University of Massachusetts Press

Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry is a collection of short stories by Christine Sneed, the winner of the Grace Paley Prize in short fiction. The book is one of the most well-written, heartrending, and remarkably real collections I've ever read. Nothing is left to do after reading Sneed's collection except go back to read the same stories over again for their raw, hard, and gritty overwhelming of the senses.

If you find yourself detached from your emotions, read one of Sneed's short stories, and it will cause you to look at yourself from a new view. From story to story, the author delivers truth and meaning to the reader, who can't help but be absorbed into the world of each protagonist. With an underlying feeling of selfishness, the characters prove that life is painful, regardless of a role one plays in the world. The angst-ridden, trying personalities intensely attempt to assert their power and needs, laying their story open raw. Displaying her characters flaws and insecurities, Sneed exposes us to thoughtful and caring people who question life, yet proceed in living.

Sneed teaches creative writing and literature courses, and you may imagine her creations spring from the classroom. The slices of life may be drawn from her experiences and her characters may be extensions of her students. When faced with life's confrontations, compassion and sensitivity pour into every page, garnering steps towards redemption. Thoughtful and introspective artists and everyday people arise in the stories, which simply demonstrate the struggle of everyperson. Subtle and solemn, Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry will knock you out again and again.

Written by: Carolyn Espe, January 23rd 2011

The Vintage Book of American Women Writers

mandy — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Edited by Elaine Showalter

Vintage

Anyone who has taken their share of English literature survey courses will tell you that the women considered great enough to be included within the literary canon are few to be found, as women writers have been marginalized throughout history. Even today, the title “great American novelist” is one that has yet to be bestowed upon a woman, and many women writers whose work has literary significance find their work disregarded as "chick lit." The Vintage Book of American Women Writers helps to give women their due. The 848-page book traces the history of women writers in America, beginning with Anne Bradford, the first woman to be published in Puritan America, and ending with such contemporary writers as Amy Tan and Jhumpa Lahiri.

Among the most noteworthy additions on the table of contents is feminist Kate Chopin, who was revolutionary in her time for depicting women who hungered for an independent life outside of the confines of marriage and children and who sought out their own sexual fulfillment. Included within this anthology are “Story of an Hour” and the two connected stories: “At the Cadian Ball” and “The Storm.” “The Storm” was particularly groundbreaking; written in 1894, it presents a woman who, in the throes of lust, commits adultery during a violent thunderstorm. Due to the sexual explicitness of the story, it was never published until 1969, over seventy years after Chopin originally wrote it.

Continuing along the same vein are works by Dorothy Parker (“Big Blonde”) and Edna St. Vincent Millay (“First Fig,” “Second Fig,” and “What My Lips Have Kissed”). Both writers also portrayed women who expressed sexualities that challenged societal mores, although this specific story by Parker displays a woman who becomes trapped by the limited role she is left to carry out in society.

Even with multiple English degrees under my belt, I found there to be many stories and writers within the anthology I had not read, or even heard of. Among the writers whose legacy has been somewhat left to obscurity is Alice Bradley Sheldon, who posed as a man and wrote under the pen name James Tiptree, Jr. in order to better her chances of publication. Tiptree, who once belonged to the CIA, wrote compelling science fiction works. The included selection, “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain,” reflects both her background in the CIA and the knowledge she gained through her Doctorate degree in experimental psychology. Also included within this collection (and one could not imagine any anthology of women in literature not including them) are a selection of poems from Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Adrienne Rich.

The Vintage Book of American Women Writers makes note of the struggle women have fought in order for their voices to be heard within the literary world. Of course, many people are apt to argue that there are many wonderful and historically significant women writers who did not make it into the collection, but there is only room for so many in one book. In the end, this anthology successfully underscores the overlooked importance women have played in literary history.

Written by: Adrienne Urbanski, January 17th 2011

The Woman with the Bouquet

brittany — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, Alison Anderson

Europa Editions

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt was been described as one of Europe’s most beloved authors and just a few pages into the first of the five short stories that comprise The Woman with the Bouquet, I began to seriously doubt that claim. Initially, “The Dreamer from Ostend” seemed heavy-handed and awkward in its formality, so much in fact that I found it difficult to focus on the story. However, I trudged forward, and I’m happy that I did. I blame the jerky translation, but once you get past that you’ll be drawn into the secretive world of Emma Von A, an old, “invalid” inn-keeper who shares her deepest secret and most severe heartbreak with a young writer who’s staying at her inn hoping to recover from his own love-related sadness. Family members, such as her niece, tell the writer that Emma Van A has essentially led a lonely, suicide-inducing life; a life spent dreaming and staring out windows. What they don’t know is that Emma has a burning secret, so pure and true that it’s sustained her through years of sickness and sadness.

Emma’s tale sets the tone for each story featured in The Woman with the Bouquet, a book solely comprised of emotionally stunted, brokenhearted, dejected, and insecure loners who, despite their age, don’t seem capable of detaching themselves from the difficulties associated with adulthood. With unflinching honesty, Schmitt reveals just enough about each person to shed light on their inner workings and what makes them tick.

In “Perfect Crime,” we become acquainted with Gabrielle de Sarlat, a wife and mother who’s convinced herself that her husband is doing something deeply dishonest and for a lack of a better word, shady. It’s common knowledge that he has a hiding spot in his office where he keeps a number of small chests under lock and key, the contents of which he will not share with his wife. This is a source of great unease for Gabrielle and it’s only made worse by the types of everyday annoyances that grate on your nerves after years of being married to the same person. For example, Gabrielle’s husband often refers to her as “old girl;” he believes this to be a term of endearment, while hearing it makes Gabrielle’s blood boil. When it feels as if marital bliss has flown south, many women would seek refuge in their friends or in the warm embrace of a cocktail, but Gabrielle murders her husband in a particularly cruel way. Well after his death, Gabrielle finally gets to investigate the contents of the chests in her husband’s office and what she finds are poems, letters, and other tokens of his love that he hid not out of guilt for wrongdoing, but out of embarrassment for his own sentimentality.

Each character and story in The Woman with the Bouquet brought to mind a quote from Janet Fitch’s White Oleander, in which Astrid’s imprisoned mother Ingrid tells her, “Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space... If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself...”

Now, those are depressing, unsettling words (for Schmitt’s characters) to live by.

Written by: Tina Vasquez, December 13th 2010

Best Lesbian Romance 2010

payal — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Edited by Radclyffe

Cleis Press

This is a light, sweet collection of short stories featuring women in love with women. I'm thoroughly impressed by the diversity of the stories' characters. Each story is very different from the next. I read about the lives of queer teenagers, figure skater dykes, gay cattle ranchers, and butches racing their cars.

There were women of different ages, races, and personalities. There was even a story with vampires and shapeshifters. Some characters were traveling. Others were looking back on their lives, or starting new ones.

I felt thoroughly entertained and sometimes moved by these stories. My only issue was the lack of development in some narratives. I wasn't sure if some authors originally included more writing to begin with, or if details were edited out later by Best Lesbian Romance 2010 editor Radclyffe in order to save space. In any case, I would have liked to feel more attached to some of the characters. For example, what happened to the lesbian couple who attended the social dance together? The ending only hints to a big scene taking place and isolation to follow.

The authors' writing styles vary. Some are humorous, while others are straightforward. Many of them follow their emotions as they willingly receive what comes to them. While one author would make me laugh, another would easily make me sentimental. For example, my heart skipped a beat when a woman's car tipped over during a suspenseful race.

If variety is the spice of life, then this book is certainly spicy. Speaking of spice of a different nature; there isn't much to be had here. Details of bedroom intimacy are limited and polite. However, this is a romance collection, not an erotica collection. Those seeking heavier scenes should look elsewhere. If you're looking for heartwarming and fun stories about lesbian love, however, you won't be disappointed!

Written by: Jacquie Piasta, November 15th 2010

The Company of Heaven: Stories from Haiti

priyanka — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Marilene Phipps-Kettlewell

University of Iowa Press

Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell's collection of short stories, The Company of Heaven, is an unkind narrative of Haiti and Haitians. It is unkind in the way one can be unkind when recalling a sibling’s awkward puberty or seeing for the first time, the humiliation of a parent by a stranger in a public place. She is unkind to her Haitians and yet she remains a family member, intimately invested and loyal. It is difficult to like even one of her characters, however, it is even more difficult to look away from them.

In "Meat," a stranger stranded at the airport in Boston describes the contents of her suitcase. Cooked meat to delight her undernourished relatives in Haiti for at least a week. The traveler cannot stop returning to Haiti and yet she describes a mean Haiti where dog fights dog and even goat, and family members are picked up off the street by masked men and discovered decomposing in sewage holes.

The living are also decomposing: there is sickness in Haiti and Phipps-Kettlewell rarely distinguishes between mental, spiritual and physical corrosion. There is cancer, old age, the lust for little girls, insanity, and AIDS too—a disease that wipes out a circle of beautiful boys and men in the story "River Valley Rooms." The narrator mourns in rooms inhabited by decaying family and filthy dogs. The narrator has returned from the US and becomes the reluctant heir to her late father’s patriarchy: spying on her brother Justin and her mother and saving them from an encroaching army of parasites siphoning off the illusory remains of the family wealth and status.

And yet Phipps-Kettlewell’s characters are not caricatures of rich and poor in a poor country. Neither the poor or the rich are noble, and the power (im)balance between the two fluctuates within each story. Phipps-Kettlewell never allows the servants, workers, guards, gardeners and other dependents of the masters to be powerless. In "Down by the River," it is the servant Venant who carries the collapsed patriarch Misye Emanyèl from his shower and hands him his teeth. There are the legion of servants who attend Misye Emanyèl’s funeral bringing their children and grandchildren: "They were there to bury our dead. We were never there to bury theirs."

The servants and poor Haitians are at the disposal of the elite, they stoke the masters’ vanities, witness their follies and also fan their paranoia. In "Land," a woman who describes herself as French and proud of it, is swindled and threatened by Sasal, her son’s poor friend, in a land deal gone wrong. Sasal is sick of ‘these bourgeois’ but accepts their money. In "Down by the River," the daughter recently bereaved by her father’s death seduces a poor child with a new dress, running water and the promise of America—she steals her away from an impoverished but devastated surrogate mother. And in "Marie Ange’s Ginen," a wily American immigrant returns to his community and extorts a travel fee from friends desperate to flee poverty. The vessel to America is overcrowded, poorly constructed and destined to sink. And yet an old mother boards it and makes a pact with death, with the ocean, with ocean zombies, that she may be taken but that her daughter must survive and escape misery.

Phipps-Kettlewell’s stories describe poor people, even her rich prose cannot conceal their poverty of both spirit and pocket. Her narrators do not conceal depravity, failure, perversion, grief, and longing. As a result, her fiction cannot be conventionally beautiful... but it is true.

Written by: Chiseche Salome Mibenge, November 2nd 2010

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modern Bestiary

priyanka — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Ian Falconer, David Sedaris

Little, Brown and Company

I met bestselling author David Sedaris in 2008 at a Barnes and Noble book-signing event for When You Are Engulfed In Flames. While he seemed more than a little uncomfortable with the kind of feigned intimacy such an event requires, he was still charming, professional, and idiosyncratic throughout our brief encounter.

He asked me if I liked turtles, as he set about doodling a smiling cartoon turtle on the title page. I nervously replied that well, I'd never eaten one, so I didn't know if I liked them or not.

“Why would you say that?” he asked.

I went on to tell him about a short online video I'd seen earlier that week. In it, an ancient tortoise was filmed trying to eat the boot of some Australian hiker, who still happened to be wearing said boot at the time. For some reason, I explained, that made me think of eating turtles. Quick as you please, Sedaris drew a jaunty pointy-toed boot just above his byline.

“You see that? That's the shoe where Mother Hubbard lives. And you see that turtle down there? He's going to murder Mother Hubbard.”

My eyes lit up like a little girl on Christmas morning. “Oooh! And the children?,” I asked excitedly, clapping my hands together.

“AND the children,” he replied with a tiny smirk, before sliding my newly signed book back to me across the table.

Based on that interaction, it seems safe to assume that Sedaris had been thinking for quite some time about the many (humorous) perils of viewing beasts through a humanizing lens. Indeed, with “April In Paris,” one of the stories featured in When You Are Engulfed In Flames, Sedaris writes:

I've often heard that anthropomorphizing an animal is the worst justice you can do it. That said, I'm as guilty as anyone. In childhood stories, the snail grabs her purse and dashes out the door to put money in the meter. The rabbit cries when the blue jay makes fun of her buck teeth. The mouse loves his sister but not that way. And we think, *They're just like us!”

Sedaris tackles the multifaceted human experience via anthropomorphized animals, to hilarious effect, in his latest book, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk. Sedaris' stories are punctuated by illustrations from Ian Falconer, who is best known as the creator of “Olivia,” the Caldecott Honor-winning series of children's books about an adorable anthropomorphic piggy. These sixteen stories almost sit like a challenge to our instinct to see animals as being “just like us.” The book also calls into question that parallel inclination by humans to pretend that somehow we're not animals. With every story, I could practically hear Sedaris' feisty voice defiantly shouting, “So, you want to see animals act like people? Here you go. Just be careful what you wish for. You might not like everything you see.”

Take, for instance, “The Migrating Warblers,” a story of two condescending migratory birds who, with their glib dismissal of other countries as inferior, embody the "ugly American." Meanwhile, “The Mouse and the Snake” directly addresses the perils of trying to claim that an animal is “just like us”—not to mention the willful ignorance it takes to keep exotic/dangerous animals as pets. “The Sick Rat and the Healthy Rat” skewers the smug supposed power of positive thinking, and ends with one of the most morbid limericks I have ever read. In “The Vigilant Rabbit,” vigilance is synonymous with vigilante justice, as one rabbit humorlessly protects the borders of “his” forest with a ruthless ferocity. A few poignant tales also appear, such as the title story, which tackles miscommunication and lost love, and “Hello Kitty,” about the unusual circumstances of a combative alcoholic cat in an inter-species prison

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk is for every human whose bosom has swelled—in delight or empathy—when watching a movie featuring CGI-animated talking hamsters, or upon seeing photos of a chihuahua whose people think it's cute to take pictures of the poor creature dressed up in a pink tutu. Sedaris' book reminds us that, just as all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares, all humans are animals—but animals are most decidedly not human.

Written by: M. Brianna Stallings, November 1st 2010

Horse, Flower, Bird: Stories

priyanka — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Kate Bernheimer

Coffee House Press

Full of self-pity and self-loathing, Kate Bernheimer’s stories in Horse, Flower, Bird are not all of what being a girl is about. This is essential to remember, because fairytales, for all their unnecessarily flowery language and lurid fantasy, taught us all who to be. Fairytales, like the more adult fables, are instructional devices; stay away from the woods, do not talk to strangers, truth and love will prevail… As corny as they always are, they imbue us with an elementary moral compass. It was their function and their rationale, it is why parents allow their children to watch Sleeping Beauty a million times into the wee hours of the night. However Bertheimer's fairytales, while unconventional and enticing, do not convey any distinct moral messages. They are enchanting stories, but not fairytales; there is nothing to be learned from them. They are simply fantastical.

Each story reveals a different experience of the world. They convey a distinct approach to, and perception of, reality. One from the point of view of an autistic person, for example, another from that of a tulip bulb. Each of the central characters is distinguishably female, not only by the pronouns used but by the point of view on the universe—as a sister or daughter.

The experiences of the characters are amplified by the subtle touch of the Southern Gothic Bertheimer infuses into her tales: The ironic views of the love/hate relationship between sisters related in “A Star Wars Tale”, the sardonic liberation of the exotic dancer in “A Cageling Tale” and the supernaturally natural reality of autism in “A Garibaldi Tale.” It is worth remembering, however, in drawing the comparison, that Southern Gothic writings were often unforgiving of the women they portrayed.

Thinking of the Fall of the House of Usher, womanhood is not a flattering state of affairs; Berthimer's characters are perhaps closer to the women of The Glass Menagerie in character—not malicious but pitiable, and in this case pitied even by the author. You would not care to be in any of these stories, and worse, you do not learn from them as from their ostensible peers in either genre associated with them. They are well written little pieces, but they leave you reaching for Poe or the Brothers Grimm instead.

Written by: Elisheva Zakheim, October 22nd 2010

In the Time of the Girls

brittany — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Anne Germanacos

BOA Editions

When do you stop being a girl? When do you start? And, perhaps most importantly, what does it mean to be a girl? These questions are necessary ingredients in order to fully ingest Anne Germanacos’ debut work, In the Time of the Girls. An exploration of history and individual experience, the book forsakes the traditional plot-driven narrative for a collection of short stories which themselves are a mosaic of prose and dialogue infused vignettes, each individually titled.

Feminist theory discourages identifying women as a definitive group whose lives are bound to each other on the basis of a shared gender. However, I am consistently reminded how my experiences mirror those of the women I’ve encountered throughout my life. Germanacos shines in her ability to tap into the collective consciousness of women as she deftly articulates the moments where our lives intersect.

“Men on Crosses” is an abstract, yet poignant, story that uses biblical allegory to explore pregnancy, abortion, and the ever-present dichotomy of choice. “Sundering Twins” explores identity and sexuality through the relationship of two outcast individuals—“He was an orphan, she the lesser half of a pair.” My favorite stories include the titular chapter, “In the Time of the Girls,” a celebration of the many ways of being a girl, and “Infinity,” which begins by asking, “But was it a doll or a person, or both? And, who could say? The girls, I guess, who read the stories, or the mothers who read them to the little girls who couldn’t.”

In its best moments, In the Time of the Girls reads like a lost diary of your favorite Women’s Studies professor—one part feminist prose and one part academic text. A cacophony of insights, Germanacos bravely and creatively tackles gender, race, religion, imperialism, and more, always returning to the nebulous experience of being “girl.”

Written by: Alicia Sowisdral, September 29th 2010

Cold Snap: Bulgaria Stories

mandy — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Cynthia Morrison Phoel

Southern Methodist University Press

There is hardly anything more satisfying to read than well-crafted short stories. Cynthia Morrison Phoel’s debut collection of tales from Bulgaria intertwines the stories of several families living in fictional Old Mountain, many sharing a concrete post-Communist apartment building, neighbors in crumbling plaster houses; and often, surviving similar struggles in their attempts to find love and meaning in life and to escape the poverty they have always known.

In Cold Snap, we meet unhappy couples who argue, then don’t speak because there’s nowhere to go, no way to leave the other person and the tiny space they have carved out together. An underemployed husband spends his summer earnings on a satellite dish; soon, his friends have filled the apartment, pushing out any space for reconciliation with his migraine suffering wife. Their son begins to fail his English class, where his teacher gives lessons on contextual words like heartbreak, forsaken, hanky, and drunk—words that feel funny to learn and nevertheless described abysmal realities and people at whom you should not laugh.

The beauty of these narratives is that they’re told across stories, in nonlinear ways. A young mathematician graduates and faces an uninspiring future. One woman compulsively knits extraordinarily beautiful sweaters, the kind that her friends joke could only be worn on shows like Dallas. Upon completion, she abandons them by the dozen in her cellar. The only woman who has made it out comes home for a visit, but leaves again for Japan before she is ensnared by her old life. The community dentist is busiest in cold months—the only time she is truly swamped—when the townspeople flock to the only place where they can sit in a well-heated room for several hours at a time. In the final story, after which the book is named, every character makes one final appearance as the entire village waits for the central heat to come on in the dead of winter with one powerful yet simple flick of a switch.

Phoel worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bulgaria, and it shows. She writes the way only a cultural insider can, with compassion and humor and insight into the lives of her characters and their unique struggles. Yet her forced distance is the best part of her work. Through her, we peer into the lives of others without ever fully inhabiting them. The balance is perfect.

Reading about the street dog affectionately called “Cucumber” because of his protruding rib cage—who shows up in every one of the book’s stories—I cried so hard one evening that I woke my sleeping partner. For a long time, we were both unable to sleep. Even the less overtly sad of these bleakly charming stories kept me up at night, entranced, and haunted me still weeks later. If only everyone could translate the experiences from their time abroad into such compelling fiction.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, September 25th 2010

Small Displacements

admin — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Vanessa Furse Jackson

Livingston Press

This tiny, obscure (I am the only person as of this writing to add and review it on Goodreads) volume of short stories by England native and Ohio resident writer Vanessa Furse Jackson ties together eleven tales into a loose theme: sudden changes in someone's life, whether major or minor, and the resulting shift felt afterward. Most of the stories are overtly sad, with others having just undercurrents of a sort of foreshadowed melancholy with abrupt endings. These lead the reader to hunt backwards over what was just read, looking for further clues to piece together some sort of denouement other than the insidious daylight gloom at story's end.

The titular “displacements” experienced by the stories' characters range from the prolonged deaths of spouses, the growing apart of spouses, and the chance meeting of unhappy strangers with something to offer the other. Children are not spared these wounds and scarifications of life, and instead seem to fare the worst in Jackson's stories. Prankster adolescents are thrust from their childhoods by a strange, menacing adult, a fourteen-year-old girl waits with her mother in an abortion clinic, and two young siblings are faced for the first time with the death of a friend and their uncertainty at how to grieve. Though all the stories are brief and the characters necessarily sketched as concisely, the reader can't help but feel emotionally invested in them nonetheless.

I think Vanessa Furse Jackson shows skill as a character artist; her detail and language is sparse, but it doesn't hurt her storytelling and writing prowess. She just doesn't engage in overly flowery or purple prose, preferring to concentrate instead on her characters and the situations and actions in which they find themselves. At 155 pages, Small Displacements is a quick, needle-sharp, and gut-punching read.

Written by: Natalie Ballard, August 21st 2010

Her America: “A Jury of Her Peers” and Other Stories

admin — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 09:00:00 +0000

Edited by Patricia L. Bryan, Martha C. Carpentier

University of Iowa Press

Popular in her own time, Susan Glaspell has somewhat fallen out of favor in contemporary academic circles while other American writers of realist fiction such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Willa Cather have enjoyed more attention. Yet, Glaspell enjoys a mini-renaissance in Her America: "A Jury of Her Peers" and Other Stories, an edited collection of twelve short stories that joins a growing movement led by feminist scholars to recuperate her work.

Spanning the years 1914 to 1927, these stories are vibrant tales of the United States at the turn of the century and are alternately humorous and touching, speaking to timeless concerns such as individual isolation, our collective responsibility to each other, the illusions we hold about ourselves and others, and the cost of pretending to be someone we’re not. Many readers will easily see themselves and/or their neighbors in Glaspell’s vivid cast of characters—whether it’s the young adopted woman who mourns the discovery that her biological mother was not a gypsy (“Unveiling Brenda”), or the pseudo-intellectual who feels sorry for his brother’s “common” life only to learn that his brother had, in fact, felt sorry for him (“Poor Ed”).

Glaspell’s compassion for the people who populate Her America is striking. This is clear in such stories as “The Manager of Crystal Sulphur Springs” wherein a caretaker chooses to let her elderly patient die rather than have him suffer potential humiliation or in the case of the farmer from the beautifully written “Pollen,” a man who obsessively isolates himself from his neighbors until he realizes that “I can’t have good corn while their corn’s poor.” Yet, even in stories wherein Glaspell pokes fun at her protagonists, she does so with an empathetic touch, reminiscent of Mark Twain’s satirical humor. A memorable instance is the story “Looking After Clara” about a vain man whose romantic overtures are undone by his beloved’s wily cat.

While it’s somewhat unfortunate that Glaspell is almost exclusively known for “A Jury of Her Peers” and the play Trifles on which it is based, it’s no wonder that this is the case. The story focuses on Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale who piece together a neighbor’s motive for killing her husband. While their husbands and the country attorney belittle their attention to Minnie Wright’s jarred preserves, quilt pieces and birdcage—what the men openly mock as “trifles”— these objects hold the key to her motive. These women come to realize Minnie’s desperation, and Mrs. Hale laments, “We live close together, and we live far apart,” questioning what was the greater crime—Minnie murdering her husband or her own failure to visit Minnie. Readers enjoy a pleasant surprise at encountering the story in its original version here. Between 1917 and its inclusion in The Best Short Stories of 1917 published in 1918, Glaspell made several revisions, most significantly deleting the final line, “He [the country attorney] did not see her [Mrs. Hale’s] eyes." Reprinting the original version opens up new interpretive possibilities for a classic of feminist literature.

Besides the stories, Her America opens with a very useful introduction by the editors Patricia L. Bryan and Martha C. Carpentier. It provides background information about Glaspell’s early career and publication history while also introducing the stories’ thematic concerns and summarizing key features of Glaspell’s style. Overall, this book is a welcome text in reviving interest in Glaspell’s shorter works, and its cast of characters should definitely be introduced to a new audience. Since this collection provides just a taste of Glaspell’s skill as a storyteller, one can only hope that a complete collection of her short stories is forthcoming soon.

Written by: Dr. Jennifer A. Smith, August 20th 2010

The Thing Around Your Neck

admin — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 01:00:00 +0000

By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Knopf

My friend Francine, who sensibly chose to read English at Cambridge, knowing my insatiable appetite for novels, asked me to taste and see that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was good five years ago. I devoured Purple Hibiscus. Sated and ravenous, I only halfheartedly digested Half of a Yellow Sun, because I felt that it did not reflect the brilliance of the first novel—maybe precisely because Purple Hibiscus could not be matched at all in the way it presented the fragrance, colour, and texture of Nigeria.

I must admit that I was not a fan of short stories before this collection, as I have always felt that they were perhaps a lazy man's (or woman's) way out of writer's block. Because I enjoy breathing and living and feeling characters, I also dismissed them because I felt that there was no time to do so in a short story. In The Thing Around Your Neck, Adichie proved me wrong. She catapulted my prejudices towards the short story upside down, deconstructed my theories inside out, and then proved me wrong again.

Adichie in this collection is simply brilliant. Astonishingly, all of her stories are accessible and beautifully written; they are told with poise, in elegant prose, just as one would expect from a contemporary griot. I expected some "old ladies mutterings" of extravagant and unnecessary details, rather like lashings of mache and parsley over perfectly good chicken from an overenthusiastic chef, but this was pleasantly absent; this is a woman who is not wasteful with her ingredients. Her stories, all unapologetically Nigerian in background, context, and flavour, are intentionally international and modern in their treatment of universal themes of displacement, grief, wonderment, and struggle. Her characterisations are believable; her stories never end with the exclamation marks of implausibility, and her style is almost perfect: dutiful and unlaborious. Adichie's economy of words is deliberate and yet, she still manages to march along with a rhythmic cadence. I do not know how she does it.

The Nigeria Adichie presents is not the stereotypical Nigeria that you see in documentaries that typically depict Lagos, of lives obviously so poor and futile and desperate on the streets of an overcrowded city pregnant with corruption. It is not the Nigeria of Nollywood with Mr. Ebu who deals in juju and first wives who cast spells on mistresses. Nor is it the new Nigeria that is now presented on the television programmes of the BBC and CNN—teeming with possibility (i.e., oil), just outside BRIC in terms of development, couched in fancy names such as "premium emerging markets." Adichie’s Nigeria is somewhere in-between.

Her Nigeria is the Nigeria of contradictions, of academics whose wives visit them in their sleep and tickle their balls, of wives of rich Nigerian Big Men who are jealous of their husband's young lovers, of polygamous, monogamous, gay and lesbian Nigeria, of traditional and Pentecostal Nigeria, of matriarchal pride and incredible sexploitation, of the Hausa and Igbo, of ordinary men and women, cold immigrants and warm home. No topic is off bounds and through this collection we are brought along to witness the astonishing resilience and weaknesses in the cultural, racial, and sexual dichotomies and to some extent, trichotomies that exist. This is second and third generation Nigeria, the Nigeria of the movers and shakers and doers and thinkers—a Nigeria which is staking its claim in the world. Adichie's protagonists' commentaries are sometimes humorous and irreverent, sometimes wise but always timely.

If this book had a fault, it would be that Adichie comes across as determinedly feminist. Her female protagonists are powerful, cunning, smart, and are able to form bonds that are natural, easy, and strong. Womanhood and womanly love seem to feature as an unspoken undercurrent. Most of the men appear as side dishes, certainly dispensable, most times inspiring reproach: they are often impractical, predatory, fumbling, and one dimensional. This is not to say that her approach is without merit, as it is possible that through her eyes, we are perhaps witnessing this malaise in male/female relationships and her challenge, therefore, of the natural hierarchy and of the status quo.

Although I am a natural sucker for an immigrant story and, therefore, love "Imitation," "The Thing Around Your Neck," “The American Embassy,” and "The Arrangers of Marriage," my favourite story is "Jumping Monkey Hill" simply because of Adichie’s voice in it, and her method. She uses and improves the Shakespearean technique of the play within a play to construct a story within a story and then, through this, manages to reveal yet more stories with grace and believability. Each of the stories resolve themselves, yet most of them stay with the reader, leaving us hungry for more.

Cross-posted at KimaSpeak

Written by: Akima Paul, August 15th 2010

Secret Weirdo

admin — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Lauren Barnett

Well, for a twenty-page minicomic that is filled with embarrassing stories about childhood, cat police, imaginary adventures, and an opening page offering “free hugs,” artist Lauren Barnett definitely set herself up for a difficult task. One of her biggest pet peeves as a female artist is having her comics be called cute. “I think ‘cute’ is a terrible way to describe someone’s work,” she exclaims in one of the first frames.

Besides the political cry for gender equality in the artistic community in the first few pages, Secret Weirdo is an eclectic collection of stories (or rather confessions) about the artist’s endeavors as a secret weirdo. Barnett’s comical, autobiographical telling of her obsessive entrepreneurial ventures as a child, unusual birthday present request, sick day science experiment with a frozen egg, kleptomania, and more are interrupted by imaginative pages with the Cat Police and imaginary Adventures of Master Driver and Navigirl—alter egos perhaps?

What most attracts me to her style is the lack of pretentiousness in her art. The cover is a gorgeous abstract watercolor that is both lovely and haunting; the inside frames are made up of simple, flat, black and white line drawings, messy bubbles, and scribbled text that give it what one reviewer noted as a "draw now, ask questions later" style, almost as if she is making it up as she goes along.

While her comics might seem cute superficially, there is clearly a darker, deeper level to her appropriated cute imagery; her “adorable” childhood stories are intersected with short, anxiety-filled frames about adulthood: debt, apartment searches, the dangers of diet soda. These glimpses into her personal, intimate realm are quickly interrupted by embarrassed sarcasm, or more Secret Weirdo stories from childhood, because the reality is far too daunting to dwell on. It leaves the reader wishing for more of this darkness, but still leaving us with the knowledge that there is something else behind the 'cuteness'.

In short, even though the stories are oddly specific and personal, the ambition, sarcasm, curiosity, anxiety, and nostalgia of a child and young woman resonated with me strongly, and I recommend this minicomic to other adults and teens that can handle the occasional F-bomb and sarcasm. Also, although the styles and content are completely different, I enjoyed Secret Weirdo for the same autobiographical, humorous, deeply personal snippets of Erika Moen’s DAR! Comic, so if you like Barnett’s work, read some of this, too!

Written by: Abigail Chance, August 8th 2010