Steven Millhauser © Beowulf Sheehan

About nine months after I heard Steven Millhauser’s incendiary reading at The Story Prize, his story “A Voice in the Night” arrived in the December 10, 2012 New Yorker. It starts with the title conceit: God’s voice calling the boy Samuel, who thinks the old temple priest Eli must be shouting his name in the darkness. I settled into a straight retelling of the biblical story.

Wait. Suddenly we’re in Stratford, Connecticut in 1950 with a boy lying awake one hot summer night thinking about the Samuel story, which he heard in Sunday school that afternoon. He’s listening, too. I almost felt he’d been reading the first part of the Millhauser story beside me in bed.

The story jumps again. We’re with “the Author,” also wakeful in the dark. Is it Millhauser himself, is that what we’re to assume? The piece refracts the same situation, the same story, through time and layers of meaning. Somewhere by the second page, I realized my early questions hardly mattered. Something marvelous and magical had begun to unspool across the page and hang-ups about structure or how much autobiography a reader could assume were wholly irrelevant.

“A Voice in the Night” gives a very compelling argument for a piece of literature providing its own explanations and justifications. Just as books like Lolita or The Waves stand as works that threw away the old charts and drew new maps; “A Voice in the Night” defies description. It blew the lid off how I had been viewing fiction and storytelling for quite some time without realizing my mental rut. A story can be anything—anything true and compelling. Read it for yourself.

Extra

• Read Millhauser’s “A Voice in the Night,” published in the New Yorker.

In the introduction to Rocco Samuele’s recent review of The Peripatetic Coffin, he writes:

Ethan Rutherford’s fine debut collection, is part realism, part satire, part historical reclamation, and part dystopian prophecy. Of the eight stories in this collection, half tread in domestic realism, while half, give or take, are tales of survival. The latter tend to chronicle impossible nautical missions—or the dystopian equivalent—where the central conflict hovers around man versus nature. Thus, we get to watch grown men blunder about. In fact, most of these stories feature men or boys in the act of various degrees of blundering—from the comically absurd to the hopelessly stranded to the stubbornly unaware.

We’re happy to announce that we’ll be giving away a copy of The Peripatetic Coffin to three of our Twitter followers. To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!

Further Links and Resources:

• Read the rest of Rocco Samuele’s review of The Peripatetic Coffin.
• For more on Ethan Rutherford and his work, please visit the author’s website.
• Read Rutherford’s title story, originally published in American Short Fiction and collected in The Best American Stories 2009, here.
• Buy a copy of “Summer Boys,” as originally published in One-Story.
• You can also check out Marie-Helene Bertino’s 2011 interview with Rutherford to accompany the publication of “Summer Boys” in One-Story.

Congrats! To claim your free copy, please email us at the following address:

winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com

If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us!

Thanks to all of you who are fans. We appreciate your support. Let us know your favorite new books out there!

Poets voice that which has no voice in this world. They speak in tongues, and hope their words reach the ears and touch the hearts of those who know what it means to live. Much like fiction writers, poets struggle to remember how to make sense of existence. They share a passion for language, and a common, driving need: to imagine the world not just as it is, but how it ought to be.

Poetry tends toward silence. It accounts for the void in a way that fiction is not always able to do. Poetry aspires to be a song, more than a story, to be lyrically rich. It is also full of primal messages that, somehow, can express the inexpressible. There is more than meets the eye. Fiction writers can directly benefit from reading poetry in this way; lines inspire sentences, stanzas transform paragraphs, as poems animate pages.

Poetry has always been integral to fiction. The former is a condensed version of the latter. Prose is poetry expanded. Poetry assimilates many things into one, to create a composite figure, edited down to the bare essentials. It is grossly specific, reducing myriad sensations into single, immeasurable qualities. It can also generalize to an incredible degree, equating objects and subjects in the most unusual ways. Put simply, a poem is like finding the needle in a stack of prose.

Yet because small seeds grow tall trees, baby bricks make big buildings, and single moments have the power to change lives; poetry and fiction have a crucial relationship. It is a matter of fertility, potency, and efficacy. A novel becomes greater than the sum of its chapters when it has the blood and guts of poetry in it. Then people really feel what they read, and understand the meaning of the story on different levels.

The presence of poetry in prose is unmistakable. As lyrics flow into longer forms, the narrative is born. The only real difference between fiction and poetry is one of expression. It is a matter of inspiration, that often becomes epic.

Editor’s note:

It is our great pleasure to publish this guest post by Lucas Hunt. With the months of April (National Poetry Month) and May (Short Story Month) bumping against one another, we decided to ask Hunt if he could smooth the transition with a few thoughts for our readers about why fiction writers should read poetry.

Hunt is a rare literary triple threat: a poet, a publisher, and a literary agent. In 2006, Hunt published his first volume of poetry, Lives (Vagabond Press), and won a John Steinbeck Award. Hunt’s second volume of poetry, Light on the Concrete (The North Sea Press), was published in 2011 to critical acclaim. Hunt also works as a rights manager with the East Hampton, New York-based Philip G. Spitzer Literary Agency, a firm that handles, among many other authors, the estate of Andre Dubus and the work of Andre Dubus III. And in 2013, Hunt launched the independent publishing company Hunt & Light with a mission to “share the voices of great poets, and inspire people to create new worlds.” The house’s first publication was Matthew Frazier’s debut collection of poetry.

I’m a white male. I feel guilty but helpless about how those facts might influence my reading preferences, especially since I’ve been charged with introducing college students to literature. I’m always on the lookout for authors I can love and teach who are not white, not male, and this is how I came to Amy Tan, who is, of course, neither. “Rules of the Game,” from Tan’s debut book of connected stories,

The story is about Waverly Jong, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, as she ascends to the highest levels of competitive chess by age nine. It has a number of superficial pleasures, and this was what drew me in initially. I was delighted by Tan’s hilarious, acerbic portraits of the Chinese mother, full of pride and confusion and dislocated old-world values, speaking in her brusque broken English. As she tugs knots from Waverly’s hair, for example, Waverly teases her ruthlessness by asking about Chinese torture. The mother doesn’t understand it’s a joke, of course, and responds:

Chinese people do many things. Chinese people do business, do medicine, do painting. Not lazy like American people. We do torture. Best torture.

Tan also sends us running with adventurous children through the alleys of San Francisco’s Chinatown, and her descriptions of the place are sharp and entertaining. She shows a fish market’s display tank, for example, “crowded with doomed fish and turtles struggling to gain footing on the slimy green-tiled sides,” then goes further to show the hand-written sign instructing tourists, “Within this store, is all for food, not for pet.” These are details that show us both the physical and the psychic features of this world— not only its material substance but also its population’s attitudes, as well as the wider cultural attitudes impinging upon it. White visitors want to adopt the turtles; Chinese residents want to eat them.

This is how the details begin to signal the story’s larger themes of cultural conflict. The turtles show a basic incompatibility between Chinese and American values, and it shows the Chinese community’s readiness to defend their culture. This dynamic is carried to the extreme in the passage about torture. What cultural innovation could be more appalling than torture? It is an ugliness, which means excellence only makes it uglier. It should evoke anything but pride, and that’s why the mother’s prideful response is so funny. It shows how radically loyal she is to her Chinese heritage and how quick she is to criticize Americans, no matter what the topic. She prefers Chinese culture over American culture, and that preference outweighs nearly every other consideration.

Tan never mentions the cultural implications of these things. She doesn’t even let her characters fully recognize them. In fact, she never once uses the word “culture.” Instead, she embeds these ideas in the details—description, action, characterization—a narrative technique originally developed by realists such as Flaubert, whose goal was to be “present everywhere and visible nowhere” in his stories. He believed, in other words, that the author should align every narrative element with a story’s deepest themes (“present everywhere”) but never intrude on the narrative with overt announcements or simplistic allegories about those themes (“visible nowhere”), as many writers before him did. The effect, as Travis Holland describes it in his FWR essay “Present Everywhere, Visible Nowhere: Flaubert’s Eye for Detail,” is that such details can “paint a vivid scene, often beautifully, but look a little closer and you’ll discover that the solid ground you’re standing on is in fact ice. And under the ice, in the dim green light, another story is being told.”

The ice, in this case, is Waverly’s pursuit of chess, while the cultural conflicts swim in the dim green light. Waverly, born American to Chinese parents, is growing up in two worlds. Tan even gives her two names, one that ties her identity to each culture. Her official name, “Waverly Place Jong,” comes from the street her family lives on—quite literally a patch of America, albeit a long and narrow one. Her family calls her Meimei, Chinese for “little sister.” Not surprisingly, she has learned to maneuver through the incompatibilities of these two worlds. One such incompatibility arises when Santa asks her age. Waverly narrates, “I thought it was a trick question; I was seven according to the American formula and eight by the Chinese calendar.” She has a solution, of course: “I said I was born on March 17, 1951. That seemed to satisfy him.”

But Waverly veers toward American behavior as she pursues chess. Tan has her approach the game in a classically American fashion, the result of which is a classic American success story. First Waverly watches her brothers play, then begs them to teach her, and then takes more extreme measures to improve, studying fundamental strategies in library books, looking up words she doesn’t know, even drawing a chessboard and staring at it for hours. She accosts an old man playing in the park and convinces him to mentor her. She gives up social activities to study chess theory. In this way, she becomes a national champion and gets her picture on the cover of Life magazine. This is, in fact, the embodiment of the American Dream: no matter where you come from, if you have the smarts, take initiative, and work hard enough, you can achieve anything.

Tan makes this connection between chess and America even clearer when she has the mother conflate the rules of the two. As Waverly’s brothers try to teach her the game for the first time, the mother takes the rule book, gives it a cursory, uncomprehending glance, and concludes:

This American rules. Every time people come out from foreign country, must know rules. You not know, judge say, Too bad, go back. They not telling you why so you can use their way go forward. They say, Don’t know why, you find out yourself. But they knowing all the time. Better you take it, find out why yourself.

Once again, this shows the gulf between the Chinese culture the mother understands and the American culture that surrounds her. But this time Tan is careful to associate the principles of America and the conventions of the chess, and the mother seems to be asking Waverly to forge ahead in both. Waverly, of course, already understands what the mother doesn’t, and she is happy to advance within the American system of personal achievement.

Tan portrays the Chinese as caring less about personal achievement than they do about humility, harmony, and community. Waverly’s brother acquires his chess set at a church Christmas party, for example, and though it’s used and has two pieces missing, the mother exclaims to the unknown donor, “Too good. Cost too much.” As soon as they get home, she tells her son to throw the chess set away. “She not want it. We not want it.” The mother is clearly offended by the gift, but her public response shows her greater appreciation for humility and respect. Tan reinforces this as a cultural standard, not just a family quirk, when a boy from another family is visibly disappointed by his gift and gets smacked and then dragged away, his mother “apologizing to the crowd for her son who had such bad manners he couldn’t appreciate such a fine gift.” Later, when Waverly begins winning exhibition matches, her mother, nearly bursting from pride, is careful to maintain humility by announcing, “Is luck.” The community accord that results from such humility and deference allows the entire neighborhood to celebrate Waverly’s achievements collectively. The Chinese bakery displays her trophies, then frosts a cake declaring her “Chinatown Chess Champion,” and other businesses offer to sponsor her for national tournaments.

Tan lets us glimpse the monster shaping up beneath the ice by forcing these competing value systems into contact. There would be no cultural conflict about what do to with the turtles, for example, if white tourists didn’t venture into Chinatown. In the same way, Tan lets Waverly venture further into chess and demonstrates how it carries her away from the Chinese community and its values. When she improves enough to beat her brothers, for example, the tradeoff is clear: “Soon I no longer lost any games or Life Savers, but I lost my adversaries.” She advances according to American notions of success, but it costs her interaction with her family members. Her American pursuit, in other words, distances her from the Chinese world, sometimes quite literally: after winning two neighborhood tournaments, she “attended more tournaments, each one further from home.” And she “no longer played in the alley of Waverly Place. [She] never visited the playground where the pigeons and old men gathered.” Likewise, her behavior moves away from the humility and harmony the Chinese value. She stops doing dishes, refuses her finish her meals, and makes her brothers sleep in the living room rather than share her bedroom as they always had.

This culminates when Waverly accompanies her mother to the Saturday market and grows irritated by her mother’s vicarious pride, though it seems innocuous enough: “‘This my daughter Wave-ly Jong,’ she said to whoever looked her way.” Finally Waverly says she wants it to stop, and in the resulting argument, Tan finally pits the two sets of cultural values directly against each other, Waverly taking an American perspective of individual accomplishment and the mother taking the Chinese perspective of communal bonds:

“Aiii-ya. So shame be with mother?” She grasped my hand even tighter as she glared at me.

I looked down. “It’s not that, it’s just so obvious. It’s just so embarrassing.”

“Embarrass you be my daughter?” Her voice was cracking with anger.

“That’s not what I meant. That’s not what I said.”

“What you say?”

I knew it was a mistake to say anything more, but I heard my voice speaking. “Why do you have to use me to show off? If you want to show off, then why don’t you learn to play chess.”

It could be argued that Waverly is displaying a certain kind of humility here by asking her mother not to “show off,” but if so, it’s certainly not the kind of humility the Chinese in the story value. In every other example of it, the Chinese characters have displayed respect for the feelings of others above their own, whether in graciously accepting crummy gifts, downplaying personal success, or celebrating the success of others. That’s clearly not the case here. Waverly is putting herself first. She’s also denying her mother’s pride in their association, challenging the values of family and community. For Waverly, pride is reserved only for the individual who achieves something (“If you want to show off, then why don’t you learn to play chess”), not for the community that supports and enables it. All of this undermines the harmony that the Chinese values promote. And at this point, she rips her hand from her mother’s and runs away, severing their physical bond just as she has severed their cultural bond.

When she finally returns home, hours later, her mother instructs her brothers to ignore her as punishment: “We not concerning this girl. This girl not have concerning for us.” The story ends with Waverly sitting alone in her room, beginning to consider what her success at chess has cost her: “I was gathered up by the wind and pushed up toward the night sky until everything below me disappeared and I was alone.” This wind is an extended metaphor that deserves its own examination, though this is not the place for it. The basic idea is that Waverly rises so high that she ends up alone—or as we Americans like to put it, It’s lonely at the top.

Amy Tan (c) Robert Foothorap

And then comes the final line: “I closed my eyes and pondered my next move.” My students often complain that this ending seems abrupt, unfinished. In the anthology we use, it comes at the very bottom of the page, and students often admit to having flipped to the next page, expecting the story to continue. Usually I avoid telling them that it does continue in the collection of linked stories, because doing so allows students to dismiss the ending as a concession to the larger narrative or as something other than an ending. Instead, I direct them to the letter by Chekhov in which he famously instructs A.S. Suvorin, “You are right in demanding that an artist approach his work consciously, but you are confusing two concepts: the solution of a problem and the correct formulation of a problem. Only the second is required of the artist.” In other words, the writer’s job is, first, to write about questions complex enough that they avoid simplistic answers or easy moralizing and, second, to demonstrate such questions with precision and accuracy. The writer’s job is not, however, to answer them. Answers are not only reductive, they’re also political, prescriptive, moralistic, and this undermines the efforts of such realists to be “visible nowhere.”

This is exactly what Tan’s ending accomplishes. To show Waverly’s “next move” would provide an answer, and, as Chekhov says, that’s not her job. For as long as America has been a country—longer, even—immigrants and their children have found themselves standing on opposite sides of a cultural divide. The immigrants belong to the old world’s culture, the children to the new world’s. Tan emphasizes this problem by leaving us on the brink of Waverly’s decision: will she continue to pursue an American system of values despite its costs, or will she decide the cost is too high and return to her family and its Chinese values? This is the moment when the problem is, at last, fully articulated, which means Tan can end the story. It isn’t her job to tell us how to resolve such a complicated and pervasive dilemma, only to show what it’s like to be trapped within it. “Rules of the Game” accomplishes this with subtlety and precision, and that, among its many other pleasures, is what makes it a story I—and my students—love.

Further Links and Resources:

• Buy a copy of Tan’s 2011 story “Rules for Virgins,” published by byliner.
• For more on Amy Tan, her work, or “A Day in the Life of Bombo,” please visit the author’s website.
• Be sure to read Travis Holland’s craft essay “Present Everywhere, Visible Nowhere: Flaubert’s Eye for Detail.”
• Finally, here is Julie Lew’s 1989 essay for the New York Times on Tan’s early success, entitled “How Stories Written for Mother Became Amy Tan’s Best Seller.”

At the onset, a good book, and especially a good story collection, gives you the tools to read it. In the earliest pages, there is a contract established between reader and writer—one that is set through the narrative’s tone, its authorial voice, its set of references, and sense of humor. After one story, the groundwork is laid for the rest of the text. Here, it says, in the coherence of its universe, this is the world you’re entering. This is what you get.

This is especially true for a writer of unusual verve and voice like Karen Russell, whose debut story collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (Knopf, 2006), and novel, Swamplandia! (Knopf, 2011), established her as one of the most exciting new writers to watch.

In her latest collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove (Knopf), Russell traffics in her now-trademark wit. In eight tightly drawn stories, she imagines fantastical worlds that stem from the bleakest realities: Japanese women- turned-factory silkworms who menstruate fabric; Rutherford B. Hayes reincarnated as a stable horse; a young boy on the nineteenth-century frontier stuck in a blizzard and approached by a shady stranger; a sympathetic masseuse whose treatment of an Iraq War veteran converts his traumatic memories as her own. The titular story epitomizes the characteristic style of prose and thematic obsessions that recur throughout the rest of the book. Though the plot lines among the eight stories differ wildly, the conceptual investigations in the first story persist and act as the glue that unifies the collection—memory, storytelling, hunger and relief, and dark flashes of humor and despair.

But sometimes a writer’s greatest strength is also—at times—her greatest challenge. In this case, Russell’s ability to manipulate situations into a kind of twisted fairy tale reveals both her keen originality of vision as well as an occasional over-reliance on the progression of dark, dark, and darker, with little reprieve. When the protagonist of the final story proclaims, “What followed over the next eight days progressed with the logic of a frightening nursery rhyme,” he could be speaking about the collection as a whole.

With unrelenting fierceness, Russell plumbs the consciousnesses of the bullied and the perpetrators, the subjugated and the scarred. Her breadth and range, in that sense, is incredible: there is not a voice or situation she’s afraid to take on, be it writing historical fiction, fantastical worlds, or other countries; writing as man, child, or someone who is centuries old; or writing from the point of view of a horse with a president’s soul. But everyone, in one way or another, is trapped. And occasionally, the reader, too, needs some air from the stifling nature of the narratives.

Luckily, we find those reprieves in the black humor that checkers the landscape, such as this send-up from the point of view of some high school boys:

We broke into Vice Principal Derry’s file cabinet and made depressing, irrelevant discoveries about the psychology of Vice Principal Derry—a Note to moi! Memo, for example, that read, in harsh red pen, BUY PENCIL SHARPENER.

In addition, Russell’s gift with language reveals itself in particularly cool images and inventive verbs, as is the case when “Snow pummels us with its million knuckles” and “the salt water sleuthed out cuts on his legs that he had forgotten about or failed to feel until now, and he almost enjoyed the burning.”

The most presiding sentiment in Karen Russell’s work, the one that never flags, is the power of good storytelling. For example, the Vampirey-bat-protagonist’s cheeky rejoinder one Halloween night:

I blinked down at a little blond child and then saw that my two hands were shaking violently, soundlessly, like old friends wishing not to burden me with their troubles. I dropped the candies into the children’s bags, thinking: You mortals don’t realize the power of your stories.

Or, this image, from our insomniac masseuse haunted with her Iraq-veteran’s memory:

She pictures the story migrating great distances, like a snake curling and unwinding under his skin. Shedding endlessly the husks of earlier versions of itself.

Russell, too, with each new story, seems to be shedding the husks of earlier ones, but the underlying feeling of storytelling’s importance grows larger with each new narrative. Perhaps only through her absurdist worlds, even more than realist ones, can we fully feel the urgency of storytelling as our only potential salvation—that we mortals can see no other way out.

Further Links and Resources:

• Read Contributing Editor Jackie Reitzes’s 2011 review of Swamplandia!.
• Check out The Rumpus Interview with Karen Russell last month.

In February of 2002, I drove north with my pregnant wife from our home in Maine to the distant coast of Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island. The journey took two days.

My wife’s family owned a small cottage in the village of Inverness, and the cottage hunkered on a hillside overlooking the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Inverness was a desolate, frozen lunarscape that winter—the wind rushed in off the ocean day and night, Osprey hung in the ashen sky, and the air was thick with salt. The sky and the sea merged into a single cold, gray wall erasing the horizon line, and we stayed inside with wood in the woodstove and hot soup on the kitchen stove. We were, I felt, in a place out beyond what we knew.

I sat in the Cape Breton cottage and read for the first time the Canadian author Alistair MacLeod’s short stories. I had stumbled upon his collection Island: The Complete Stories (2000) there in Inverness, where MacLeod’s family settled in 1946, and where he still spends his summers. There was no way of knowing as I read MacLeod’s hypnotic stories that my wife would give birth in September to a perfect baby girl, that an insurmountable chasm would grow between us, and that we would be divorced in just three years time. All I knew was how MacLeod’s stories filled and warmed my chest during that bitter Cape Breton February.

MacLeod is something of a national treasure to his fellow countrymen, yet here in America the septuagenarian remains largely unknown. His relative obscurity in this country may be due in part to the fact that prior to publishing his debut novel in 1999, the sweeping, multigenerational, Scotland-to-Nova Scotia epic No Great Mischief, MacLeod had exclusively published short stories since the late 1960s.

MacLeod’s fictional obsession is life in Canada’s easternmost province of Nova Scotia in general, and the outlying Cape Breton Island in particular. His quiet, deceptively simple portraits of the working-class people are rich and precise. MacLeod is at the peak of his powers when writing within his deepest sympathies: family, fishing, coal mining, logging, manhood, desire, and regret. “The Boat,” the very first MacLeod story I ever read, manages to contain the majority of this list.

Island gathers together MacLeod’s first two story collections—The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories (1986)—plus just two new stories. The only thing MacLeod has published since 1999’s No Great Mischief and 2000’s Island is an illustrated edition of To Everything There Is a Season: A Cape Breton Christmas Story (2004), a story he originally published in 1977 in Canada’s Globe and Mail, and then collected in As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories.

I mention all these dates and facts about MacLeod’s publishing history to emphasize just how small and precious this exceptional author’s cannon really is: sixteen stories. If we consider MacLeod’s sixteen stories spread across the forty-five years since his first story publication in 1968, that’s roughly one story every three years.

“I write them very carefully,” MacLeod once told an interviewer from Canada’s National Post. “I don’t do drafts, I change them sentence by sentence. You have to be very certain what you’re doing. I write the conclusion partway through. It keeps me focused—I think about what I want to say.”

Several MacLeod stories compete in my heart for the title of favorite. The list would surely include “The Lost Salt Gift of Blood” and “The Road to Rankin’s Point,” but his masterpiece might be that very first story of his that I read: “The Boat.” First published in the Massachusetts’s Review in 1968, and then collected in the 1969 edition of the Best American Short Stories, “The Boat” opens with a stunning example of MacLeod’s gift for balancing language between the lyrical and the declarative with utter authority:

There are times even now, when I wake at four o’clock in the morning with the terrible fear that I have overslept; when I imagine that my father is waiting for me in the room below the darkened stairs or that the shorebound men are tossing pebbles against my window while blowing their hands and stomping their feet impatiently on the frozen steadfast earth. There are times when I am half out of bed and fumbling for socks and mumbling for words before I realize that I am foolishly alone, that no one waits at the base of the stairs and no boat rides restlessly in the waters by the pier.

The short story master Alice Munro once wrote, “It is hard to think of anyone else who can cast a spell the way Alistair MacLeod can.” Reading the opening lines of “The Boat,” it is hard to argue with Munro’s assessment of her fellow Canadian.

“The Boat” is relatively simple: an older man reflects on his Cape Breton youth, his parents, and the family fishing boat. “I first became conscious of the boat in the same way and at almost the same time that I became aware of the people it supported,” the narrator recalls early in the story. In MacLeod’s hands, the narrative weaves confidently between youthful observations and the reflections of a more mature man.

Two powerful poles set the stakes around which this story revolves: the narrator’s strong, beautiful, stoic mother (“My mother was of the sea, as were all of her people, and her horizons were the very literal ones she scanned with her dark and fearless eyes”) and his older, hardworking, quiet father (“When he was not in the boat, my father spent most of his time lying on the bed in his socks, the top two buttons of his trousers undone… The pillows propped up the whiteness of his head and the goose-necked lamp illuminated the pages in his hands”).

Near the end of “The Boat,” the narrator recalls how in the months before he struck out from his tiny Cape Breton village to make a new life for himself in Canada’s cities, he fished many long, hard days alongside his father:

And I stood at the tiller now, on these homeward lunges, stood in the place and in the manner of my uncle, turning to look at my father and to shout over the roar of the engine and slop of the sea to where he stood in the stern, drenched and dripping with the snow and the salt and the spray and his bushy eyebrows caked in ice.

Father. Son. Boat. Resentment. Regret. Intimacy. MacLeod’s characters are alive to us in both their confusion and their fog-lifting realizations—the acceptance that we all must grapple with how we remember our parents in our youth versus how we see them as adults. Slow and rich and so atmospheric that you can taste the ocean’s salt spray on your lips, “The Boat” is run through with that rarest of qualities in fiction: the story feels mythic. The exceptionally astute Irish author Colm Tóibín has noted, “The genius of MacLeod’s stories is to render his fictional world as timeless.”

This past summer, the little girl who was growing in my ex-wife’s belly when I first read Alistair MacLeod’s stories turned ten.

Just weeks before her birthday, my daughter and I took an afternoon swim in the Saco River. She was suddenly strong enough to swim alongside me far out in the wide river’s gentle current, suddenly strong enough to imagine, like me, that we might even one day swim all the way across to the further tree-lined shore if only we could take our time and rest along the way, stop to drift on our backs in a dead man’s float and stare up at the impossibly cerulean sky—in an unspoken pact, we believed we were capable of moving out beyond what we knew.

Later, my daughter and I sat on the shore on our towels, the August sun fading, our bellies full with picnic sandwiches. And because she asked me to, I read aloud to her “The Boat.” When I finished and set the book aside, my daughter—her long dirty-blond hair wet and clinging to tan cheeks—looked at me and said quietly: “Whoa…”

To read Alistair MacLeod is not simply to glimpse the land, language, and hopes of his roughhewn Nova Scotians, it is to discover the hearts of our fellow humans—and to discover ourselves there, suddenly illuminated in the cold shock of salt spray.

Further Links and Resources:

• Alistair MacLeod discusses the art of writing slow.
• Alistair MacLeod reads from “The Boat” at the 11th International Conference for Short Story in English (Note: Audio is so-so).
• Alistair MacLeod and the Cape Breton thing (National Post).

Though we devote the entire month of May to celebrating short stories, there are still plenty of great collections that slip through the cracks. I guess it’s a good thing that there are too many good ones to cover. Still, these collections are a few of the titles we wished we’d been able feature. We hope you’ll check them out.

First up: Love Is Power, or Something Like That, by A. Agoni Barrett. Graywolf has always had great taste in publishing short fiction, and this collection seems to be no exception. The book has been lauded by everyone from Roxane Gay (”Love Is Power, or Something Like That crackles with the chaotic energy of modern Nigeria”) to Sven Birkerts (”A. Igoni Barrett writes close to the street, close to the appetites and nerves”) to Binyavanga Wainaina (”…the most exciting young writer producing right now”). The collection has also receiving glowing reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly.

I was a big fan of Nigerian author Uwem Akpan’s 2008 collection Say You’re One of Them (Little, Brown and Company), and I look forward to reading this author’s take on contemporary Nigeria, one that “tells the story of a rapidly modernizing country through the elusive, shifting political struggles at play in the lives and relationships of a selection of its residents,” according to the publisher.

Next: The House at Belle Fontaine, by Lily Tuck (Atlantic Monthly Press). Tuck won the National Book Award in Fiction back in 2004 for her fourth novel, The News from Paraguay (Harper). This new book is her second collection of stories, following her 2001 collection Limbo: and Other Places I Have Lived (Harper). In S. Kirk Walsh’s recent review of the collection for the Boston Globe, he writes:

In her second story collection and eighth book, Lily Tuck delivers 10 evocative stories of beautiful language and masterful economy that explore the emotional terrain of failing marriages and lost lives set amid the far-flung backdrops of Antarctica, Bangkok, and Lima, as well as domestic locales closer to home. With each story in The House at Belle Fontaine, Tuck’s unflinching eye to detail and faithful ear for dialogue bring to life the brutal, the tragic, and the melancholy.

I also look forward to getting my hands on a copy of An Elegy for Mathematics, by Anne Valente. This chapbook of “small stories” is being produced by Pittsburgh-based indie publisher Origami Zoo. The press focuses on chapbook-length projects, and they’ve published work by some of our favorite fiction writers:

• B.J. Hollars (see our recent interview with Hollars published earlier this month),
• Laura van den Berg (see our review of her debut collection), and
• Chad Simpson (see our 2012 interview with the author).

As well as other talented authors.

Another Pittsburgh Indie press whose work we admire is Caketrain. Rob Walsh’s debit collection, Troublers, is one of their most recent titles. Says Brian Evenson:

Very seldom anymore do I come across a book that makes me feel like everything—anything—is possible. Troublers does. Walsh’s tautly elegant language renders a world at once iconic and strange, one in which every action and sentiment seems lovingly considered, mercilessly dissected, and expertly defamiliarized. A terrific first book, Troublers points to a new way of doing literature.

And from Rivka Galchen: “Walsh’s stories are so odd and wonderful that they seem to have been treasured from some heretofore nonexistent Eastern European country that should now, finally, be properly celebrated.”

We hope you’re enjoying our month-long celebration of short fiction. In addition to our features, be sure to visit our blog regularly for the most recent installments of our “Stories We Love” series, as well as news and posts on all things short fiction.

Links and Resources:

• Check out Batya Ungar-Sargon’s Bookslut review of Love Is Power, or Something Like That.
• You can also read S. Kirk Walsh’s Boston Globe review of The House at Belle Fontaine, by Lily Tuck.
• Here are two of Vante’s stories published originally at Necessary Fiction: “He Who Finds It Lives Forever” and “May This Strap Restrain You.”
• Finally, flip through a digital sampler of Troublers.

The book opens with the title story, a reimagining of an underdog crew of Confederate soldiers who have volunteered to man the H. L. Hunley, the first submarine commissioned for war. Based on an actual Confederate sub of the same name, the Hunley has an atrocious record of killing its crew. Ward Lumpkin, our despondent, wobbly-legged narrator asks, “What kind of person signs up for duty aboard a self-sabotaging vessel that has failed—spectacularly—almost every meaningful test it has ever been given?” This is the question the story sets out to answer. The type of person, of course, is Ward himself, and his like-minded crewmates. Do I believe the actual men of the Hunley were self-deprecating jokesters? Does it matter? Not for this reader.  Because Ward’s humor amid the tragedy is appropriately balanced, his sarcasm doesn’t undercut the emotional import.

Further, the key word in Ward’s question is duty, because duty is what the men of the Hunley are trying to fulfill, as is the case with many of the protagonists in this collection. They’re trying to be soldiers, friends, husbands, sons, fathers, camp counselors, shipmates. As for this story, I can see why Alice Sebold selected it for The Best American Short Stories 2009; both witty and lyrical, it’s a bittersweet heroic tale that lingered with me for hours after reading it. I sympathized with Ward and his ill-fated crew for their ingenuous will to carry out their duty, regardless of cost.

While the survival stories are all first-person narratives that slip, perhaps too frequently, into the awkwardly unreliable “we” voice, the domestic stories are third-person accounts that treat the characters as individuals, mostly. I say mostly, because one exception is the pitch-perfect, soulful story, “Summer Boys.” We experience the relationship of two boys in the summer following fifth grade. The boys are so intent on mimicking each other they practically become one another. Together they ride BMXs, collect Garbage Pail Kids, and emulate the NFL gladiator of the time, Brian Bosworth, with his “hair from the future.” This, it seems to the boys, is the way it must be, forever. Most readers will relate to the fragility of friendships at this age, which is where the story derives its tension. We are waiting for something to disrupt the harmony. That something arrives in the form of an older cousin, a boy from the opposite bank of puberty. Suddenly he becomes the object of the boys’ affection, and the story opens to a host of new possibilities. This is what I enjoy most about Rutherford’s domestic stories: along with being confidently aimed, they feel utterly unbound. Once the stage is set, anything seems possible. In “Summer Boys,” Rutherford explores the fabric of genuine experience, capturing perfectly the naiveté and the sexual stickiness—cue the deceptively labeled VHS tapes—of a particular type of boyhood.

The other domestic stories tend to clip along as bona fide page-turners. “John, for Christmas” is the complex story of two parents—Joan and Thomas—dealing with their mentally unstable son, John, who is driving home from college. As they await his arrival, Joan struggles to understand why the men in her life have, in their own ways, grown cold toward her, while her husband drifts toward Sarah, the younger woman renting the apartment above their garage. The family is on the verge of fracture. Starting with the threat of John’s arrival and Thomas’s misguided crush, the story evolves into a tense quadrangular relationship. It is Rutherford’s ability to manage this relationship, giving careful attention to each character, which allows the story to build seamlessly toward its unsettling end. Through the character’s actions (and reactions), we witness the quadrangle deform into something that more so resembles a busted window frame.

For the other page-turner, “The Broken Group,” Rutherford swaps the quadrangular relationship for a few triangular ones. After an argument between eleven-year-old Robert’s parents, father and son end up sailing their boat back to port alone, while Mom and sis ferry home from a nearby island. The story is careening into sentimental waters when Rutherford yanks the wheel. From the boat, Robert notices a disheveled man on the beach of an uninhabited island. Here, the fictional machinery is at work. This man is the kind of character Charles Baxter would refer to as a “Captain Happen,” a character who arrives for the purpose of making things happen, to give the story an adrenaline boost. So the moment Robert’s father decides to help the man, the story bursts with mysterious possibility, and soon we find ourselves in dark coming-of-age territory.

Interestingly, this story straddles the boundary between what I’ve been calling the domestic and survival stories. Although father and son are on a voyage during family turmoil (domestic), we sense the possibility of extreme physical danger (survival). Early in the story, Robert makes the embarrassing mistake of letting the anchor chain slip through his hands, so we wonder if he’s ill-prepared as a crewmate. Then we learn of the gale-force storm that has blown through; so the sea becomes charged with menace and unpredictability. Unlike some of the other survival stories, this story doesn’t turn to humor or sarcasm to relieve the tension, and there is a much better chance that our protagonists will survive. We possess more than a shred of hope for them, which allows a reader to invest in the outcome.

Lack of hope can be an issue in some of these stories. At times, though largely entertaining, the survival stories can stall in their hopeless scenarios. They tend to be slow burners, wallowing in a character’s daily labor. I found the visionary “Dirwhals!”—a semi-epistolary, dystopian nod to Moby-Dick—a tad toothless in the way of a story that depends perhaps too much on a clever idea. The narrator logs letter after letter to his distant sister, dipping into a past that once was. By the end, however, Rutherford manages to infuse it with enough earthly doom, enough tragic prophecy, to reveal its tender heart.

And in “Camp Winnesaka,” another survival story of sorts, forget tenderness altogether. Here we experience the largest tonal shift of the collection. It’s a cute satire about a camp counselor who carelessly amasses camper fatalities as he deals with the theft of their mascot, Moosey, the moose head. The narrator, trying to explain the death of a camper named Ward (not the Ward of the title story), says:

The night was very dark, remember. And this was…well, they didn’t find Moosey. I’m not even sure how far they got. And Ward, it’s possible he wasn’t wearing a life jacket. Or maybe he was wearing it backward. There’s a chance that—I mean, it’s hard to say what really happened.

These narrative hesitations can be clunky as characterizations, since the narrator so blatantly announces his culpability. The story, however, does have its successes. Namely, it makes a decent argument for the absurdity of how blame is deflected during war (think, “mistakes were made”). It brings to mind George Saunders’s Iraq War satire, “Adams,” where a threat between neighbors escalates into full-blown paranoia.

For all the variety in these stories—tone, subject, pace, etc.—the collection feels, without question, cohesive. The themes complement each other; the assemblage—order and variety—is cleanly balanced; and the recurring nautical settings provide a unifying stage for the narrative action. At times, some of the stories feel constructed, like machines wound up for the purpose of telling a story. But there are plenty that unfold organically. “Summer Boys,” for example, feels particularly authentic, as if Rutherford were uniquely positioned to tell us the story. This could explain why we don’t detect, or even care to detect, its fictional machinery.

Sentence-by-sentence, Rutherford has proven his craft chops. Near the conclusion of the inventive story, “The Saint Anna,” a historical piece inspired by the journals of an early twentieth century Russian expedition ice-locked in the Kara Sea, Piotr Bayev says, “We tell ourselves that when stretched so thin, men will shame kindness and become unforgiving. That survival itself is a form of grace.” The collection is full of beautiful sentences like these, and in this impressive debut, Rutherford has proven his grace as a storyteller.

Further Links and Resources:

• For more on Ethan Rutherford and his work, please visit the author’s website.
• Read Rutherford’s title story, originally published in American Short Fiction and collected in The Best American Stories 2009, here.
• Buy a copy of “Summer Boys,” as originally published in One-Story.
• You can also check out Marie-Helene Bertino’s 2011 interview with Rutherford to accompany the publication of “Summer Boys” in One-Story.

In Maria Mutch’s recent conversation with the author, the two writers discuss the junction between the domestic and the weird in Gerkensmeyer’s stories, as well as the importance of residencies, writing in bursts, and how narrators reveal themselves. In response to a question about the role of fabulist elements in her work, Gerkensmeyer says:

I can’t point to a conscious moment in my writing life where I thought I needed to start using fabulist elements. I think that “Hank” is my first story that took on a surreal quality and it’s so funny to think back on it because I remember sitting in my little room, and just not being blown away that suddenly this was a story about a baby who speaks. I’m confused by that moment, and the absence of shock, but I’m actually really glad that it happened that way, that it wasn’t this moment where I thought I was making a shift in my writing and things are going to be off-kilter in a very exaggerated way. And with your thoughts of the domestic, I start to wonder if I’m using those strange elements to complicate this idea of comfortable domesticity and status quo. The fantastic is a way for me to challenge our sense of what we’re comfortable with and who we are.

We’re happy to announce that we’ll be giving away a copy of What You Are Now Enjoying to three of our Twitter followers. To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!

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Links & Resources

• Read the rest of Maria Mutch’s interview with Gerkensmeyer.
• Visit Sarah Gerkensmeyer’s website.
• Read about images that haunt Sarah at Ron Hogan’s Beatrice.
• Read her story “Dear John” at Guernica.
• Two recent reviews of What You Are Now Enjoying, in The Coffin Factory and Hayden’s Ferry Review.