Via the Emerging Writers Network, watch this two-part video featuring Matt Bell–editor of The Collagist–talking with authors Michael Czyzniejewski (Elephants in Our Bedroom) and Kyle Minor (In the Devil’s Territory) about writing short stories and putting together their collections.
I want my life to be a Kelly Link story. I mean it, even though many of the characters in her stories are a little lost, literally or emotionally, and even though others are in danger. Pretty Monsters is intended to be a young adult collection of short stories. This in itself is new—there aren’t many YA story collections, are there? But even if there are, there is nothing like Kelly Link. It’s useful that a few of the stories in Pretty Monsters are republished from her earlier collections, Magic for Beginners and Stranger Things Happen, because I can’t talk about Kelly Link without talking about the story “Stone Animals,” which first appeared in the Best American Short Stories in 2005, and then in Magic. I still dream about it sometimes. There was a period of almost a year after I first read it when, no matter what else I was reading, I wished it was “Stone Animals.” I’ve read it a dozen times. I sort of want to be reading it right now.
Asked about his childhood religious beliefs by an interviewer, Robert Stone once said, “I was in that very difficult position you get in when you really believe in God, and at the same time you are very angry: God is this huge creature who we must know, love, and serve, though actually you feel like you want to kick the son of a bitch.” Throughout his career, Stone has drawn upon this confluence of anger and belief—and the despair that often results—to create some of his most resonant work. At their best, Stone’s portrayals of men and women guided (and […]
Julian Mazor’s wonderful, unsung second collection of stories, Friend of Mankind, published in 2004, thirty-six years after his first. Mazor’s elegant language evokes settings that are simultaneously a backdrop for and a mirror of his characters’ inner lives, and his compassion for these characters is almost physical.
There’s an old adage in these parts: If you don’t like the weather in Michigan, wait five minutes. This was certainly true to form the last several days here at the Ann Arbor Book Festival. Friday dawned beautiful, cloudless and warm. Yet by the cocktail hour the sky was spitting and sputtering. Saturday, too, threatened rain. But other than a few windy gusts that lifted the tents on the Ingalls Mall, the weather held. In fact, by mid afternoon that second day the clouds had gone. And the only rain we received was through the night—the literary Gods were smiling. […]
The Nightingales of Troy is renowned poet and critic Alice Fulton’s fiction debut. In this collection, she displays a knack for the ineffable, for creating stories that are more than the sum of their intricately assembled parts. Her best stories not only exhibit her architectural prowess, they also remind the reader of the near-magical capaciousness of the story form.
Congratulations to Elizabeth Strout, whose Olive Kitteridge, a collection of linked stories (billed as a “novel in stories”) about a curmudgeonly retired schoolteacher in Maine, has won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Finalists included Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves and Christine Schutt’s All Souls. You can read an excerpt from Olive Kitteridge here and the NY Times review here.
Daniel Chacón’s Hudson Prize-winning collection, Unending Rooms, is smart and charming, fascinating and frustrating by turns. Like that of Borges, Chacón’s fiction springs from a powerful intellect at play, but in the latter’s case that rich intelligence sometimes elevates concept over character.
The dozen stories in The First Person, Ali Smith’s latest collection, are deceptively simple: no verbal pyrotechnics, no otherworldly setting, no last-minute epiphanies, and most of the time, no traditional rising action or climax. They’re told in a simple, conversational tone, often by a narrator who could be Ali Smith herself. But they stay with you long after you’ve finished reading them. They sneak up on you, camouflaged as innocuous little anecdotes about innocuous little interactions and misunderstandings, and only later do you realize they’re asking the most fundamental questions that fiction, or life itself, can ask.
The stories in Chris Adrian’s third book (and first story collection) are idealistic, relentlessly imaginative and existentially harrowing—(Flannery O’Connor/Lorrie Moore) x Kafka=Chris Adrian. Using a unique mixture of shocking imagery and surprising tenderness, Adrian illuminates the pathologies of the trauma-battered, those stricken by grief or illness who choose to funnel their angst into healing or annihilating activities. The results are individual, startling, and luminous.
