Congratulations to this year’s winners of The Collection Giveaway Project! Earlier today we held four separate drawings to determine the recipients of our free story collections, and here are the results:

1. Shannon for Laura van den Berg’s collection What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us
2. Pete for Joshua Furst’s collection Short People
3. Barrett Shipp for Skip Horack’s collection The Southern Cross
4. Melanie Yarbrough for Robin Black’s collection If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

Thanks also to Erika Dreifus of The Practicing Writer (who first suggested the giveaway), the editors of The Replacement Blog, and Lucy Blue at Before There Were Children for joining this project. You can find the winners of their contests on their sites.

Most of all, thanks to everyone who participated in our May is Short Story Month celebration. We received more than fifty wonderful recommendations from our readers for favorite collections or collections they’re looking forward to reading, and the selections ranged from classic must-reads to debut fiction. Here they are, in no particular order, just in case you’re short on a list of good books to read…I mean, it is the start of summer.

1. The World is the Home of Love and Death, by Harold Brodkey
2. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, by Ernest Hemingway
3. The Age of Grief, by Jane Smiley
4. Separate Kingdoms, by Valerie Laken
5. Airships, by Barry Hannah
6. Finding a Girl in America, by Andre Dubus
7. Jenny and the Jaws of Life, by Jincy Willett
8. Girl with the Flammable Skirt, by Aimee Bender
9. The Point, by Charles D’Ambrosio
10. Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri
11. If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home, by John Jodzio
12. A Few Short Notes On Tropical Butterflies, by John Murray
13. Do the Windows Open? by Julie Hecht
14. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Carver
15. Nine Stories, by J.D. Salinger
16. Girl Goddess #9, by Francesca Lia Block
17. Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout
18. The Holiday Season, by Michael Knight
19. The Palace Thief, by Ethan Canin
20. Girl Trouble, by Holly Goddard Jones
21. Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, by Lydia Peelle
22. The Secret Goldfish, by David Means
23. Where the Dog Star Never Glows, by Tara L. Masih
24. Boys and Girls Like You and Me, by Aryn Kyle
25. Call It What You Want, by Keith Lee Morris
26. Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories, by Shirley Hazzard
27. Between the Assassinations, by Aravind Adiga
28. Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri
29. The Boat, by Nam Le
30. Where the Money Went, by Kevin Canty
31. The Red Convertible, by Louise Erdrich
32. The Thing Around Your Neck, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
33. Something Is Out There, by Richard Bausch
34. At the Jim Bridger, by Ron Carlson
35. The Pacific and Other Stories, by Mark Helprin
36. The Tiger in the Grass, by Harriet Doerr
37. Out of the Woods, by Chris Offutt
38. Legend of a Suicide, by David Vann
39. The Murphy Stories, by Mark Costello
40. The Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick, by Philip K. Dick
41. Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, by Justin Taylor
42. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, by ZZ Packer
43. How to Breathe Underwater, by Julie Orringer
44. Through the Safety Net, by Charles Baxter
45. Drown, by Junot Diaz
46. The Dead Fish Museum, by Charles D’Ambrosio
47. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower
48. The Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley
49. The Secret Lives of People in Love, by Simon Van Booy
50. How to Escape a Leper Colony, by Tiphanie Yanique
51. Do Not Deny Me, by Jean Thompson

As the month winds to a close over Memorial Day weekend and summer officially begins, we’ll also be wrapping up our celebration of May as Short Story Month. Inspired by The Emerging Writers Network and their unparalleled coverage off all things story-related each May, as well as The Poetry Book Giveaway For National Poetry Month, we decided to launch The Collection Giveaway Project (warm thanks to Erika Dreifus of The Practicing Writer for suggesting our site as a home for this promotion).

The goal is a simple one: to get readers talking about their favorite stories and story collections. So all month we’ve been publishing interviews and reviews and essays with a special eye toward the art of the short form. We’ve also been publishing blog posts about several story collections that we’re going to give away free to readers on Monday, May 31. And we’re happy to report that The Practicing Writer and The Replacement Blog have joined us in offering free collections to their readers, as well.

To be eligible for any of these free books, all you have to do is click on that book’s title link (below) and leave a note in the comment field of the original post about one of your favorite story collections.

What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, by Laura van den Berg. Jeremiah Chamberlin writes: “The stories in this collection feel ‘of a family,’ for lack of a better phrase. Not because most involve elusive creatures and foreign locales, or because exploring and discovery are central themes in all, but because collectively the stories seem to be working toward answering the same question: How can things disappear from our lives so quickly? Whether a husband, a father, one’s health, or happiness, the world these characters inhabit has the potential to change in an instant. And there is little left to do other than sort through, sort out, and move on.”

Short People, by Joshua Furst. Lee Thomas writes: “We all had one. It’s one of those universals of human experience, more constant than love or rage or betrayal or grace. I’m talking about a childhood. Still, it’s impressively difficult to capture on the page, pitch the right tone, allow the perfect amount of insight and innocence, or describe the overblown drama of what it feels like to be a kid. From the opening story of his collection, Short People, Joshua Furst nails it. That first story, ‘The Age of Exploration,’ follows the ramblings of Jason and Billy, best friends, both age six. Most of us can remember things that happened when we were six. But Furst reminds you what it’s like to be six – what it feels like to discover the world.”

The Southern Cross, by Skip Horack. Celeste Ng writes: “I am often skeptical of reviews by people who know the author: sometimes they’re a bit too chummy, like Sarah Palin praising Glenn Beck. (Ew. Just—ew.) So let me start off by saying that I do know Skip Horack, but only slightly. We met at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in 2009…I hadn’t read any of Skip’s work before the conference, but I made a note to myself to pick up his collection, The Southern Cross, as soon as I got home. Set in the Gulf Coast in 2005—the year of Hurricane Katrina—the collection is timely and relevant in the way the very best fiction is.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, by Robin Black. Anne Stameshkin writes: “Before I recommend or send any book to one of FWR’s reviewers, I always read a sample story or two, a chapter, or maybe the first fifteen pages. If I fall in love, I order a copy of the book for myself. But sometimes there’s a novel or collection that demands to be read immediately. If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This made me forget I had a job, a website, friends, a boyfriend waiting for me to pick him up, dinner burning on the stove. And even after finishing this book (and sending it off to the reviewer), I couldn’t resist buying two more copies–one to keep and one to share as part of Short Story Month 2010: The Giveaway Project.”

Who I Was Supposed to Be, by Susan Perabo. Erika Dreifus (of The Practicing Writer) writes: “One of the bright lights that sustained me through my MFA program was my friendship with Susan Perabo, a gifted teacher (her ‘large group’ workshops and craft seminars were among my very favorites) and equally gifted writer. I read Susan’s debut collection, Who I Was Supposed to Be, very soon after meeting the author at my first residency in May 2001. And then I reread it, bought it for friends’ birthdays, etc. I even mentioned it right here on the blog three years ago. And now I’ll buy a copy for one of you.”

The Pale of Settlement, by Margot Singer. Erika Dreifus (of The Practicing Writer) writes: “This is another book I have mentioned here before. (I’ve also written about it for Kenyon Review Online.) Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction, and the Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, The Pale of Settlement is also another book that I’ve been unable to stop recommending to others.”

If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home, by John Jodzio. The Editor of The Replacement Blog writes: “What better way to celebrate short stories than by giving away a free, signed copy of John Jodzio’s If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home? Metro Magazine recently put it at #1 on their May survival kit, calling it ‘a sad, weird, masterfully drawn short story collection.’”

And finally, Lucy Blue at Before There Were Children, is giving away a copy of Going Away Shoes by Jill McCorkle. In her self-described “rave” of this collection, Blue writes: “I couldn’t put it down. [...] I would think about the stories and the characters long after the story was over. I couldn’t wait to crack it open and read the next one to see where it would take me [...] and even kept the book past its due date at the library to have the boyfriend read it as well.”

The Collection Giveaway Project contest ends at 12:01am on May 31.

Winners will be contacted by Fiction Writers Review, The Practicing Writer, The Replacement Blog, and Lucy Blue. Results of the drawings will be posted shortly thereafter.

For any other bloggers, authors, or publishers who would like to join in on the fun, here are directions to participate. Feel free to leave a comment below that directs readers to your site.

Bonnie Jo Campbell’s story “The Inventor, 1972” begins here, with a sentence that ushers us into a world both familiar and strange. Some of the details feel worn. They are the near-clichés of the rural short story: the rusted old car, the fog rising off the fields, the swift and unforeseen violence. But their deployment is fresh, the voice distinct. There is the dreamy suspension of the present tense, the elided conjunction between clauses; there are the knowing inflections of an omniscient narrator and, significantly, that surprising article: not “a thirteen-year-old girl,” but “the thirteen-year-old girl.”

The main characters in the story—point-of-view passes back and forth between the injured girl and the driver of the El Camino—are at once anonymous and exposed. The reader knows them only as “the girl” and “the hunter,” yet the detached omniscient voice occasionally cracks into the higher register of free-indirect narration (“Footsteps like heartbeats! Someone is coming through the fog!”) as the story wanders further and further from the present moment—the girl on the side of the road, the hunter searching for help—burying itself in the characters’ heads and in their pasts, teasing out surprising connections between their lives. By the story’s close, the inciting event seems less an accident than an act of fate.

Of course, neither the girl nor the hunter is aware of the connections between them; their perspectives are necessarily limited, incomplete, in a way that the reader’s is not. The story is held together as much by its white space as by its text: its emotional freight is conveyed through dramatic irony, a product of reading between the lines.

That “The Inventor, 1972” closes on an upsurge of loneliness—the hunter, taken into custody by authorities, recalls a moment of intense physical connection from his childhood—is only fitting: dramatic irony is a lonely concept, dividing reader from character with a gulf of knowledge. Thus, the story isolates reader and characters alike in analogous fashions. This is a subtle accomplishment, a case in which formal innovation does not distract from a story’s emotional center but instead augments it—is, in fact, inseparable from it.

“The Inventor, 1972,” like so many of the fourteen stories in Bonnie Jo Campbell’s American Salvage (Wayne State UP, 2009), evokes the ache at the center of the rural experience with startling clarity and force. The stories in American Salvage know what it means to occupy landscapes in which humans are outnumbered by animals and in which nature, beautiful and indifferent, rushes in to fill the physical and emotional distances between individuals. Set in a natural world that is (as Richard Ford described it in “Great Falls,” a story that is itself deeply eloquent on the subject of this rural ache) “without patience or desire,” Campbell’s stories explore what is uniquely human: the grinding exercise of patience, the headlong pursuit of desire.

Subtly daring and meticulously observed (a girl standing in an autumn field “kicks out rabbit holes in the yellow grass to keep warm”; the mysterious appearance of thousands of dead honeybees in the basin of a kitchen sink fills a house with a smell both salty and sweet), American Salvage captures its subject so convincingly, and from such surprising angles, that even a reader comfortable with the trappings of contemporary rural fiction may feel Campbell’s rural ache as if for the first time.

Trappings: in this context, the word isn’t accidental. Campbell’s stories are fresh entries into a subgenre—the rural short story—whose approach to its subject has too often, lately, whiffed of staleness. Readers may be familiar with rural short fiction in its too-predictable form already—stories that capture the grotesqueries, poverty, violence, and addiction at the margins of rural life in pungent detail, but with clockwork regularity.

This is not entirely a criticism. Such stories share an eye for the suffering of what Frank O’Connor called “submerged population groups” or “the Little Man,” those for whom “familiar society is the exception rather than the rule”—surely a fair description of those living within the rural experience described above. These stories belong to a tradition traceable back through Flannery O’Connor, John Steinbeck, James Agee, and William Faulkner to the peasants of Chekhov and Turgenev, and perhaps even further still, to fairy tales (Jack was just a poor farmer before he climbed that beanstalk) and minstrelsy. Like their forebears, the very best contemporary stories in this vein—consider Benjamin Percy’s “Refresh, Refresh,” Donald Ray Pollock’s “Real Life,” or Annie Proulx’s “What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?”—are charged with the stark empathy of a Walker Evans photograph.

At the same time, however, even these very fine stories represent a solidifying sense of how the rural experience should be dealt with in fiction. They share a tough-minded worldview and a microscopic eye for grit that is beginning to feel increasingly familiar.

It’s true, of course, that the life of the Little Man and Woman in the rural world (and in Proulx’s Wyoming stories, to be fair, every individual, rich or poor, is equally “Little” when set against that vast, implacable landscape) is going to involve hardship and grit, and that in writing these lives, tough-mindedness and understatement are preferable to melodrama and sentimentality. But the problem here is not tough-mindedness and an eye for grit as such—though it’s also true that too many rural stories render up their visceral details with the relish of fetishists, an almost cultic veneration of dirt, grime, and pain; rather, the problem is the growing ubiquity and, as a result, the predictability of this treatment.

Spotting a familiar face in a fresh context—with a new haircut, for example, or sporting a black eye, or in a strange city far from home—can be a strangely thrilling experience. Her features seem strange; we are shocked into studying her in sharp detail. Our friend has been defamiliarized. We thought we knew what she looked like already, but now we are truly seeing her, as if for the first time.

In other words, the question of whether a gritty rural story is “accurate” or “true-to-life” or even “truly felt” is immaterial. The short-story author must be more than a good describer: she must be a good artist. If she wants her reader to truly see the rural world, and to be thrilled by it, she must—without sacrificing verisimilitude—find ways of defamiliarizing the rural experience. We will come no closer to understanding the world these stories depict unless we are made to see it once again as if for the first time. And yet in many contemporary rural stories, there’s just too much that feels familiar, like the features of a face we know too well to study.

Throughout its fourteen stories, American Salvage nimbly balances these competing demands—for authenticity on one hand, for originality on the other. True, the reader will encounter familiar rural tropes: methamphetamine addiction, roadhouse bars full of factory workers, incest, old men drinking beer and jawing on the tailgates of pickup trucks. But in these deft stories, even old saws feel sharp.

This is sometimes—as with “The Inventor, 1972,” constructed as an engine for dramatic irony—the result of Campbell’s formal daring. Several stories in the collection bracket their narratives with multiple points of view; another, “The Solutions to Ben’s Problem,” is presented as a list of possible actions its titular character could take. Stories range from four to nearly thirty pages long, and not one of them ends quite where the reader expects. And at every turn, Campbell’s skill with language (her poetry collection, Love Letters from Sons of Bitches, recently received the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Award) provides her fictional world with the thickness and heft of reality. She is a gifted noticer of the telling detail: in “Boar Taint,” the men in a ramshackle farmhouse sit around a kitchen table with “a forward curve to their shoulders, with their forearms resting on the table as though they were defending bowls of food, only there were no bowls.”

But even more so than through their form and language, these stories unsettle the reader by baring their brimming hearts. If it is commonplace in the rural short story to vividly depict ways in which characters are broken, then what is decidedly uncommon is Campbell’s attention to the ways in which damaged and broken lives may, as per the collection’s title, be salvaged. Without offering bromides or easy solutions, each story is inflected by an abiding respect for even the most damaged (and damaging) characters. They are like the catalytic converters torn from junked cars in the title story: “mostly they were dirty and rusted from the slush and mud and road salt, but each of their bodies contained a core of platinum.”

Here, triangulated between the grit and hardship of necessity, the loneliness of nature and a reverence for it, and the migrations of good and decent hearts—or, at least, hearts that strive in clumsy, sometimes self-defeating ways to be so—through a world that feels cold or, worse, actively hostile to their concerns, Bonnie Jo Campbell has located and renewed the rural ache.

Sharp, strange, and surprising as it is, American Salvage places Campbell among such authors as Barry Hannah, Ron Hansen, Alice Munro, Carolyn Chute, Dan Chaon, and Tony Earley as one of the most distinctive—and therefore necessary—practitioners of the contemporary rural short story.

It’s impossible, of course, to take stories as varied—and as wonderfully odd—as “The Inventor, 1972,” Hannah’s “Water Liars,” Hansen’s “Wickedness,” Munro’s “Carried Away,” Chute’s “Lizzie, Annie, and Rosie’s Rescue of Me with Blue Cake,” Chaon’s “Fitting Ends,” and Earley’s “Prophet from Jupiter” and lump them under a single heading. But it is exactly this—their singularity—that charges them with defamiliarity. Their idiosyncrasy is their artistry; their strangeness is why we should care.

Further Links and Resources:

We all had one. It’s one of those universals of human experience, more constant than love or rage or betrayal or grace. I’m talking about a childhood. Still, it’s impressively difficult to capture on the page, pitch the right tone, allow the perfect amount of insight and innocence, or describe the overblown drama of what it feels like to be a kid. From the opening story of his collection, Short People, Joshua Furst nails it. That first story, “The Age of Exploration,” follows the ramblings of Jason and Billy, best friends, both age six. Most of us can remember things that happened when we were six. But Furst reminds you what it’s like to be six – what it feels like to discover the world:

Billy knows about the past and the present, but Jason has learned something new. It’s a secret. Jason knows that the world gets bigger, but it gets smaller, too. He knows there are things he does not want to know. He knows his dad was an engineer once, and now he’s unemployed. He’s going to be an inventor after summer is over and move the family away to a new city, Jason knows that too, but he can’t tell anyone. Jason knows about the future, now. You can be one thing and another and then another and another and on and on, but the things you become sometimes wash the things you once were away. Jason knows what he wants to be when he grows up: he wants to be friends with Billy.

Each of the ten stories in Short People puts you right there, from the longing of a shy girl to be as brave and brash as Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan, to the mercilessness of teenage boys at a Boy Scout Jamboree. Furst’s story “Red Lobster,” which won the Nelson Algren Award, gives a hilarious and horrible glimpse of a father gone so utterly off the rails that an outing to Red Lobster becomes a life-and-death experience for his children. Just flipping through it again, I might be ready for a re-reading. Sign me up for whatever Joshua Furst writes next.

To win a free copy of the book, comment on this post!

In your comment, tell FWR about a story collection you love (or one you’re looking forward to reading): on May 31, we’ll do a drawing of commenter names, and one lucky winner will receive a copy of Short People. To be eligible, your comment must include the name and author of a story collection. Feel free, if time permits, to tell us more about the book. We look forward to hearing from you!

Learn more about how to participate in Short Story Month 2010: The Collection Giveaway Project.

I frequently happen upon Selected Shorts on NPR midway through a story and go through a predictable course of thinking: I’ve missed the first part of the story. I should just download the podcast and hear it from the top. Wow, that sentence was brilliant. What the heck is going on here? And then I end up listening to the conclusion of the story and enjoying it immensely.

Now that I’m in New York, I hope to make it to one of the live stage performances of Selected Shorts. If you’re lucky enough to already have a ticket, on May 26th Selected Shorts will celebrate the stories of This American Life with an evening featuring Ira Glass, Mike Birbiglia and Elna Baker. Just in time for Short Story Month, this evening is also a part of New York Book Week. I’m excited for the Audience Favorites performance on June 9, when three stories nominated and chosen by listeners over the past season will be read onstage.

But no matter where you are, a short story read aloud is a very fine thing, so check out your local library or bookstore to see if any authors are visiting or giving readings. I’ve also been thinking a short story supper club might be the busy friends’ solution to the book group. Each week or month, one person could read a favorite short story after dinner or over a cup of coffee, discussion to follow. Pre-reading not a requirement.

What are some of your ideas about how to celebrate the read-out-loud story?

Jeremiah Chamberlin

Marissa Perry

It’s especially appropriate to highlight Glimmer Train this month—Short Story Month—as it’s one of just a handful of journals that publish only short fiction. Moreover, Glimmer Train provides great support to its writers, offering payment (which many journals aren’t able to) and searching out first-time authors. And that attention to quality pays off. The editors report:

In a recent edition of Best American Short Stories, of the top “100 distinguished short stories,” ten appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, more than any other publication in the country, including the New Yorker.. We are pleased to say that, of those ten, three were those authors’ first stories accepted for publication.

Order Glimmer Train Issue 75 for $12, or—even better—subscribe for a year (four issues) for just $36. For submission guidelines and a monthly breakdown of GT’s contests, click here.

I am often skeptical of reviews by people who know the author: sometimes they’re a bit too chummy, like Sarah Palin praising Glenn Beck. (Ew. Just—ew.) So let me start off by saying that I do know Skip Horack, but only slightly. We met at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in 2009, and though we chatted a few times, this is the moment that stands out in my mind. It was a very hot August day, and I was trudging back to the dining hall in search of a cold drink when Skip and his roommate (the poet Matthew Dickman) hailed me. They’d dragged a couple of Adirondack chairs out into the middle of the lawn, and when I came over, they graciously offered me a seat and a beer from the ice-filled garbage can that sat between them. When my roommate passed by, we called her over too. Soon there was a small crowd of us lounging in the grass. Someone brought out a stereo. Someone else started an impromptu game of baseball, and we watched while Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash crooned in the background. It had nothing to do with writing, but it was one of my favorite moments of the conference.

I hadn’t read any of Skip’s work before the conference, but I made a note to myself to pick up his collection, The Southern Cross, as soon as I got home. Set in the Gulf Coast in 2005—the year of Hurricane Katrina—the collection is timely and relevant in the way the very best fiction is. Unlike the characters in the book, we know what’s coming their way, so a short exchange like this, from “The Journeyman,” fills the stories in the first half of the book with eerie foreboding:

“I come by to warn you.”

“Yeah?” Clayton slid the socket onto the drain plug, grunting as he gave the wrench a hard twist. “About what?”

“God and Jesus are up to something.”

“That so?”

“Reverend Gray says they gonna punish this city soon enough.”

A car alarm started up just a few blocks over, and Clayton grinned to himself. “Yeah,” he said. “I imagine they will.”

The collection has no fear about facing the horrifying details of the storm. Take this passage, from “The Redfish,” the story in which the hurricane arrives:

Gray light filled the trailer and Luther sat up and put on his boots. Water was flowing beneath him; he could hear it. He walked across the living room and opened the door. “Fuck,” he said.

The Pearl had overflowed its banks and flooded the woods surrounding the trailers. Pines blew like wheat in the wind; the clearing was a white-capped sea. The water lapped at the front steps, and Luther realized it was still rising. He watched as a gust of wind sent a wave surging through the pine forest. Water slapped against the top step of the trailer and soaked his feet. He saw that Shonda’s Dodge had been swept off in the night. [...]

The wind picked up even more and started snapping pines. A heavy branch crashed nearby and Luther flinched. Betty tried to close the door herself but he stopped her. “No,” he said. “You gonna make a tomb out of this trailer.”

Betty pinched him on his arm but retreated to the sofa. The water was past their ankles, and she kicked off her wet slippers. “All my things are getting ruined,” she said.

Luther admitted that they were. “Still,” he said. “Ain’t nothing in here can’t be replaced except me and you.”

Betty took up the family Bible resting on her warped coffee table. “That’s not true at all,” she said. “Not one damn bit.”

But I’ve probably given you the impression that The Southern Cross is a Book About Katrina, and that’s wrong. Most of the stories make only passing reference to the storm and its aftermath, if they mention it at all. The storm, of course, affects the characters’ lives profoundly—because this book is so firmly rooted in the world of the Gulf Coast. The real story here is not the storm but the lives and worries and fears of the people who inhabit this world. John L’Heureux aptly described the stories as “explor[ing] the geography of a place and a time and a people—and they explore it unforgettably”; Pia Z. Ehrhardt noted that “[e]ach of these deeply felt stories is an offbeat song of the new South”; Eric Puchner praised Horack for “unbuckl[ing] the Bible Belt to show us an America we tend to ignore.”

Now, I don’t believe in writing as tourism, or reading fiction to “learn” about a different place or culture. So while you will, indeed, get a vivid portrait of the world Horack so deftly evokes, learning about the South is not the reason—or at least, not the main reason—to read this book. This is: you’ll be amazed by Horack’s generosity and vision as a writer. As Antonya Nelson, who chose the book as the winner of the Bakeless Prize, noted, “Every one of these stories serves up a unique world peopled by individuals who could, each of them, star in his or her own series. They are all epic-worthy.”

It’s impossible to read the collection and not be impressed by that writerly eye, that depth of understanding even in a story just a few pages long. You can literally open The Southern Cross to any page and find a knockout moment. Take the opening lines of “Borderlands”:

His setter found her in a cold canebrake, half-buried in the loam, her mouth sealed with duct tape. Wes saw that it was her, Sara Champagne.

You could stop right there and wallow in the sad perfectness of that name—Sara Champagne—but then you’d miss the second half of the one-two punch that follows:

Three fingers had been cut from her right hand, two from her left. She was naked to the waist, and a thin red tear ran from the base of her throat and then down across her belly.

This is the kind of collection you enjoy as a reader and then read again and again as a writer, trying to figure out how he did it.

In your comment, tell FWR about a story collection you love (or one you’re looking forward to reading): on May 31, we’ll do a drawing of commenter names, and one lucky winner will receive a copy of The Southern Cross. To be eligible, your comment must include the name and author of a story collection. Feel free, if time permits, to tell us more about the book. We look forward to hearing from you!

And stay tuned for two more story collection giveaways from FWR’s bloggers on May 20 and 24th.

If you write for another blog or lit site and would like to join the Short Story Month Giveaway Project, learn more here.

Do you want to read the book yet?
Because I’m trying to make you want to read it.

Kevin Wilson, who also helps run the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, has put together a strong and surprising collection of wonderfully odd stories. We encounter an old woman who works as a substitute grandmother for children whose real grandmothers have died, or gone senile, or have had a falling out with the real parents. We follow a young man who, in addition to working in a Scrabble factory—trolling all day through hills of letters to find those he has been assigned—also might have a genetic predisposition to spontaneous human combustion. There is a second-person story, and another in the form of a handbook or lexicon. Clearly, Wilson is interested in the formal possibilities of the short story. But unlike many authors with similar interests, Wilson never abandons the very human and tender hearts of his stories or their characters.

For example, in “The Choir Director Affair (The Baby’s Teeth),” [also anthologized in New Stories from the South 2005] we don’t just hear about the baby with the shockingly large and well-formed teeth; Wilson goes to great lengths to show us the baby’s mannerisms, the general and specific gestures that make it impossible for those who encounter it (including us) not to love it, at least a little bit. We feel the heft of the baby’s small but solid form, the competing clean and sour smells of its body. This is not just a metaphor, Wilson insists, and his intelligence and voice go a long way to making us agree.

Kevin Wilson

In addition to startling story concepts and pleasurably alarming imagery, Wilson also makes the collection work as a whole. Two-thirds of the way into the book, we arrive at perhaps Wilson’s best story. By this time, readers might think we have the author’s number—a little bit of Saunders, with some Bender/Millhauserian weirdness thrown in. Then Wilson hits us with “Go, Fight, Win,” something more in line with Flannery O’Connor and Allan Gurganus. There is always a danger when writing weird, ambitious, surreal-ish short stories in getting stuck in that rut where everything has to be audacious or silly, conceptually. One can imagine another, less full Wilson collection that never would have left this land of Barthelmeian wonder and humor. And that might have been great, too.

But what strikes me as a writer after reading all those more conceptual pieces is how fully realized the domestic “Go, Fight, Win” is. It’s a coming-of-age story about an adolescent girl interacting with her younger neighbor, a boy with some hard to define mental or emotional problems. There are grace notes throughout—pitch-perfect scenes regarding first kisses, investigating the dubious authority that teenagers exert over one another, documenting moments of honest obsession and unexpected kindness.

After “Go, Fight, Win,” Wilson gives us “The Museum of Whatnot,” which encapsulates, in its imagery and concept, the argument for this author’s modes of perception and narrative, like Lorrie Moore’s “How to Be a Writer” from Self-Help or Etgar Keret’s “A Thought in the Shape of a Story” from The Nimrod Flipout. In Wilson’s story, the main character is left to tend a seemingly random collection of bric-a-bracs, to guide visitors through a collection she does not quite understand, that has accumulated randomly and without specific purpose. And in this place, people move, think, feel. They search for meaning, for love. Their lives matter to them, and they matter to us, despite the strange surroundings and odd ornamentation. It is a beautiful story, quiet and subtle and lovely, and it is also a smart story in a really, really smart collection.

So are you going to read this book or what?

Extras: For Further Reading

- Read some of Wilson’s stories online:

• “The Museum of Whatnot” in Fifty-Two Stories (also appears in Tunneling…)
• “The Dead Sister Handbook: “A Guide for Sensitive Boys” in DIAGRAM
• “Hammer” in Waccamaw
• “My Hand, Dead Tissue Severed at the Wrist” in Hobart
• “The Neck’s What Keeps Heart and Head Together” in Blackbird

(For more stories and a full list of print publications, see this page on the author’s website.)

- Wilson’s collection was recently nominated for a 2010 Shirley Jackson Award. Other nominees in the single-author story collection category are: Everland and Other Stories (Paul Witcover), Fugue State (Brian Evenson), Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical (Robert Shearman), There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales (Ludmilla Petrushevskaya), and Zoo (Otsuichi). A review of Petrushevskaya’s collected stories (translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers) is forthcoming this summer on FWR.

- Here are two great interviews with Wilson: In Redivider (by James Scott); and in The Collagist (by Matt Bell). While you’re reading The Collagist, check out Wilson’s story “Excerpt from the Big Book of Forgotten Lunatics,” which appeared in the journal’s first issue.

- It’s Short Story Month! Support short stories—and independent bookstores by ordering a copy of Tunneling to the Center of the Earth from Powell’s.

]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/tunneling-to-the-center-of-the-earth-by-kevin-wilson/feed 0 http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/nprs-three-minute-fiction-contest-round-4 http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/nprs-three-minute-fiction-contest-round-4#comments Thu, 13 May 2010 13:54:56 +0000 Celeste Ng http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=8292 May is Short Story Month, and what better way to celebrate than by reading some short fiction by emerging writers? But I don’t have time, you say. National Public Radio has the answer: three-minute fiction. These stories can all be read aloud in under three minutes—little gems to surprise and delight you in less time than it takes to microwave a bag of popcorn.

The deadline for the current round NPR’sThree-Minute Fiction Contest has passed, but while judge Ann Patchett decides on the winner, check out some of the entries. All stories for this round include the words “plant,” “trick,” “fly,” and “button,” in any form. Read this opening to “Pearl Cadillac” and I dare you to not read further:

“Grandma is a great heave of a woman in a billowing black dress. Today, this last afternoon of her life, an angry heat rash burns the supple puffs under her neck. Last night, on the front porch of the old farmhouse, we watched the western sky explode.”

Previous rounds included stories inspired by a particular photograph and stories beginning with the sentence “The nurse left work at five o’clock.” Finalists and winners of prior rounds are all available here, in the sidebar. Go on—you know you’ve got three minutes.

]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/nprs-three-minute-fiction-contest-round-4/feed 0 http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/espn-short-fiction-contest http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/espn-short-fiction-contest#comments Tue, 11 May 2010 13:49:09 +0000 Celeste Ng http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=8217 The Millions alerted us to this contest for sports-themed short fiction, sponsored by—of all people—ESPN.

Now, I love my Red Sox and my Cavaliers, but I would never call myself a sports girl. So I was skeptical of the whole idea of “sports fiction.” But I recently served on the admissions board for the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, reading applications for waitership positions, and I was surprised to see a number of well-written, compelling, and honestly interesting sports-related stories. The key? They weren’t about sports per se; they were about interesting people who happened to be involved in sports, and they guided the reader into and through a less-familiar landscape and a particular jargon just as—say—a book about India or comic-book fanatics or 17th-century Italy might. The end results weren’t a SportsCenter transcript; they were well-realized pieces of fiction set in worlds that some of us might not have encountered before.

If you’ve got a sports-themed story to tell, the ESPN contest is open to pieces 3,000 words or less. The deadline is June 1, 2010, and the winner will be published in ESPN The Magazine. Full entry rules can be found in this PDF.

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