For March, Andrew recommends three collections:
1. from a university press (University Press of Kentucky): Jim Tomlinson’s Nothing Like an Ocean: Eleven stories about life in the rural Kentucky town of Spivey; Tomlinson’s first collection, Things Kept, Things Left Behind, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award.
2. from an independent press (Autumn House): Samuel Ligon’s Drift and Swerve: From the author of the novel Safe in Heaven Dead, this story collection won the 2008 Autumn House Fiction Prize.
3. from a big house (Pantheon): Mary Gaitskill’s Don’t Cry. Gaitskill’s first collection in more than a decade is highly anticipated. Here’s an excerpt from the publisher’s blurb:
Each story delivers the powerful, original language, and the dramatic engagement of the intelligent mind with the craving body–or of the intelligent body with the craving mind–that is characteristic of Gaitskill’s fiction. As the stories unfold against the backdrop of American life over the last thirty years, they describe how our social conscience has evolved while basic human truths–“the crude cinder blocks of male and female down in the basement, holding up the house,” as one character puts it–remain unchanged.
Don’t Cry doesn’t publish until later this month (March 24) but the others are available now. Support the short story by telling your friends about Andrew’s Book Club and buying (new!) at least one of these titles this month.
