Atwood, Chiew, Clair, Herrera, Omar and Reva

Short Stories in October, November and December 2023

Whether recommended by a prizelist or a friend or an author, these stories capture a variety of reading moods.

This quarter, I returned to two favourite writers and also explored four new-to-me story writers.

Still inspired by the Ursula K. LeGuin Fiction Prize longlist, Bill and I read Yuri Herrera’s Ten Planets (2019; Trans. Lisa Dillman, 2023). At the time, I was also reading from Africa Risen (2022), an anthology which contained one of the novelettes nominated for the Nebula, Wole Talabi’s “A Dream of Electric Mothers”: it was chunky enough to serve as the foundation of my reading stack for weeks. So I was surprised that Herrera’s collection from Graywolf Press was about as thick as a magazine: such a tidy little package stuffed with stories.

The stories in Ten Planets feel like exercises in sleight-of-hand; I persistently felt that if only I slowed even further, peered more closely at the words and sentences, I might understand. His language is so clear, vocabulary and structure exacting (in Lisa Dillman’s translation): nothing about a story’s beginning prepared me for the overwhelming sense of WTF that accumulated as I turned three or four pages to the story’s end. But usually when I feel so baffled and unmoored by stories like this, I grow frustrated with the sense of missing out. Just often enough, here, I felt included in the joke. Just often enough, here, I felt as though I could share in his cleverness. It was ultimately so satisfying that I borrowed Herrera’s novella from the library just to extend the experience.

Contents: 20 stories, beginning with “The Science of Extinction” and ending with “Warning”.

Mel @ The Reading Life, recommended Elaine Chiew’s The Heartsick Diaspora (2020) so highly that I bought a copy straight away. (Then waited more than a year to read it. Sigh.) Things happen in these stories. In “Chinese Almanac” for instance, “Uncle Gerald was the first to ‘pop off’, as Tina describes it, setting off a tsunami of chain reactions, like a fifty-episode Chinese historical drama.” And “Florida Rednecks Love Moo Goo Gai Pan” opens like this: “The summer of 1996, waitressing in Tampa, a Vietnamese boy tried to take me on a date to Busch Gardens, and a lecherous cook pinched my thighs and wanted to buy me a car.” But they are compelled by characterization, rooted in a tender-hearted view of the connect-disconnect that characters struggle to navigate. “Forget lawnmower parenting, it’s lawnmower-race parenting, to see whose kid spells faster, reads better, kicks the ball like a footballer wanna-be, saves it like a goalie wanna-be, and they had better show all this potential before Term 1 Reception year is over.” Chiew, too, has shown her potential: this is only her first collection.

Contents: 14 stories, beginning with The Coffin Maker and ending with Mapping Three Lives Through a Red Rooster Chamber Pot

Maxine Clair’s Rattlebone (1994) landed on my TBR after I read her Imagine This: Creating the Work You Love (2017) but it was nudged up the stack when I saw that Marisa selected it for her monthly Plain Pleasures newsletter (free, subscribe here). It’s going to be on my list of favourite reads for this year, I’m sure. Clair’s full-throated use of language, her acute social observations, her boundless empathy: such a treat to read these interconnected stories. And what a thrill to realise in the very first that the collection will reward rereading too. Sometimes she makes me grin: “None of this escaped my friend Jewel Hicks, the pink-ribboned, talks-too-much, needs-her-butt-beat jewel daughter of the on-our-party-line Mrs. Hicks.” Sometimes she tugs at my heart: “And every one of those hundreds of days filled itself up with small waits—for the iron to heatup, the skillet to sizzle, the child to get home from school, Sunday to come, payday, a word, a glance, the truth.” (I’m not listing the chapters because it’s best to discover the plot as it unfolds.)

The small format of Idman Nur Omar’s The Private Apartments (2023) makes it feel like a secret. The stories themselves move from Rome in 1991 to Toronto in 2020 and sometimes they do disclose private details. Often the characters notice and intuit just what the reader’s intended to focus on: “Usually, these visits ended with Hooya questioning Awoowe Rashid. She was embarrassingly inquisitive about the old man’s children—especially his daughters in America. If the question was straightforward enough, Awoowe Rashid would answer. Then Hooya would inch closer to the heart of her curiosity—why had they abandoned him? She never said it so plainly, but I knew she was always skirting this question.” With a sense of flipping through a photo album, this is a varied and intriguing collection that poses hard questions for characters and readers alike.

After I finished reading one of the stories in Steven Heighton’s Instructions for the Drowning (2023), I outlined the whole thing to Mr. BIP while he was making dinner. Heighton’s stories aren’t particularly long, but nor does he waste a word: Mr. BIP was stirring something on the stovetop, a captive audience. But the premise of the story was so astonishing, Heighton’s resolution of it so discombobulating, that Mr. BIP has mentioned it twice in conversations since (the story might well have been true but, even if it wasn’t, Heighton’s talent seemed to make it so). These stories are meticulously crafted, and his capacity for locating the hinge upon which a story turns is inimitable. I’ve read one of his previous books and it landed his backlist on my TBR; this collection has turned him into a MRE author for me.

“After a while he clicks over to the file containing his jilted book and starts reading. A little to his surprise (and even while peering through the bifocals of fresh rejection) he finds himself not wholly horrified. So he continues to dip into the book and read with increasing relief, even pleasure, as if perusing the fine and honest work of a stranger—yes, dense with cruel truths but not devoid of all hope.”

Contents: Instructions for the Drowning; Repeat to Failure; As If In Prayer; Expecting; Professions of Love; You’re Going to Live; Who Now Lies Sleeping; Everything Turns Away; Desire Lines; Notes Toward a New Theory of Tears; The Stages of J. Gordon Whitehead

Through November, I also read a few stories from Dancing Girls and Old Babes in the Woods for Margaret Atwood Reading Month (#MARM).

Dancing Girls:
“Rape Fantasies”
“Hair Jewellery”
“A Travel Piece”
“The Resplendent Quetzal”

Old Babes in the Wood:
“First Aid”
“Two Scorched Men”
“Morte de Smudgie”

These are, respectively, her first and newest story collections and I found it very satisfying to see how some themes reverberated between them. Together, pairing these collections also reminds me of how I’ve changed as a reader, because Dancing Girls was one of the first of her books I read (so long ago, it’s neither logged nor blogged anywhere) and I know I didn’t see all the layers in the stories that are so satisfying now (and perhaps Atwood didn’t express her ideas so concisely all those years ago either).

(I’m trying something new with this image; you should be able to pull and drag, to see as much of either book’s cover as you desire.)

Another book I read with MARM in mind, was Maria Reva’s Good Citizens Need Not Fear (2020) because Atwood recommended it on Twitter back in March 2020 when she offered reading recommendations to anyone who was looking for a good book (they posed questions, said what they’d read and enjoyed recently, and MA responded). Reva’s collection is linked by characters and by the building at the heart of it: 1933 Ivansk (in Russia for the first story, the U.S.S.R for the last). Even though I’d read the first story previously, I didn’t think of skipping it: it’s possibly still my favourite. The comic thread running through it adds a sharp thrill to readers’ enjoyment (as do the illustrations), but the connection forged with readers as time passes is what adds layers to that enjoyment. As a storyteller, Reva is incisive and slightly twisted: it’s a deadly combination on the page.

Contents: Part One, Before the Fall: Novostroika, Little Rabbit, Letter of Apology, Bone Music, Miss USSR; Part Two, After the Fall: Lucky Toss, Roach Brooch, The Ermine Coat, Homecoming

 

Other than the MARM stories, I didn’t read short fiction in December. Mostly I was reading and rereading novels for review work. And peeking into, but not wholly reading, a variety of books included in pitches for new work in 2024.

I’ve not tallied/sorted anything yet, but over the course of these four quarterly posts, I suspect my short story reading is fairly typical for 2023. For 2024, I suspect the number of stories I read will be greater, but the number of collections fewer: I’ve got a few Collected Stories already in my stacks. (More about that soon. Yes, Sue, another teaser.)

How about you, which stories are you reading?
Which collections stood out for you in 2023?
Which of these most appeals just now?