Bertin, Groff (Ed.), Hurston, Suzuki, and Zadok (Ed.)

Short Stories in October, November, and December

Whether in a dedicated collection or a magazine, these stories capture a variety of reading moods.

This quarter, I returned to two favourite writers and “discovered” many new-to-me story writers in anthologies.

[You were meant to be reading another 2024 catch-up post today, but it linked to talk of a short story collection and hunting for it revealed that I never published this quarterly. I’m tempted to combine it with the Winter post, but I’ve left it intact (and added with just one edit) so that it stands alone as I imagined it. OOPS!]

Kris Bertin’s Use Your Imagination! (2019) was a recommendation from Naomi (published by the Canadian, east-coast Indie, Nimbus). From the start, I could see his appeal; humour simmers beneath even the darker stories and there’s a satisfying and surprising combination of a clear-eyed and direct tone with space afforded to what’s left unsaid and unseen. There’s a risk in that openness, in prioritising silences and quiet moments, but Bertin counters that with attention to detail and strong characterisation. In turn, readers must exercise some patience in the longer stories, but this is rewarded with an unexpected gutpunch of emotion that creeps up while you’re absorbed in the specifics that set scenes and make the dialogue hum. Even though it’s the furthest away in my reading experience, I think it’s the first story that has lingered most determinedly; while I was reading, I was sure it would be the  second story with its sharp sense of betrayal and fury and resignation.

  “This silence is the worst one.

  Both of them hope for the hiss of wind and rain, or a thunderclap to open up the sky, but nothing comes. There is only their bodies and silence, and the space between them in the room. Frank searches inside himself and in their shared past for something to say, but still there is nothing.”

 Contents: Waiting for the Heat to Break and the Cold Air and Rain to Move In, Name that Mean Spirit, Use Your Imagination!, Cowan, The Grand Self, The Calls, Missy’s Story

The Correct Book/Cover (Thanks, Rebecca!)

The Best Short Stories 2024 [oops, it’s the 2023 O’Henry…see Rebecca’s comment below!] caught my attention when Bookish Beck mentioned it last year, both of us intrigued by Lauren Groff’s editorial role; I had trouble finding a copy initially, but after I so enjoyed the Best-of books from Biblioasis, I stepped up my efforts.

Ironically, the opening story, which got lost in the weirdness when I read Ling Ma’s full-length earlier this year, but here it felt like the perfect opener; “Office Hours” made me want to photocopy the pages and mail them to short-story friends.

Gabriel Smith’s “The Complete” would be described as experimental but it wasn’t so much so that I couldn’t see the fun of it resisting this—how another character describes her writing: “I just want to do things with plots now. I love competent stories. I’ve gone trad. As a reaction to time being different, maybe.”

Jacob M’Hango’s “The Mother” also appeared in Disruption, and the story I linked to in last season’s Quarterly by K-Ming Chang is included. Next to the first story, Kirstin Valdez Quade’s “After Hours at the Acacia Park Pool” really struck home, ideal for reading on a hot, sunny summer afternoon.

Contents: Twenty stories, compiled from dozens of literary magazines. It’s a whole Thing, with the process outlined in the back of each volume in the series. “If heaven exists, it must exist in the form of a clean and quiet house, a comfortable chair near a snoring dog, a glass of cold wine, and a lapful of short stories,” Groff writes.

Lauren Groff Best American Short Stories 2024

Some Other Random Groff-edited collection (heh)

Zora Neale Hurston’s Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick (2020) collects twenty-one short stories and presents them with an enthusiastic foreword by Tayari Jones and a substantial introduction by Genevieve West.

Jones speaks of their humour: “I dare you to read this book in public without releasing at least one leg-slapping guffaw.”

West speaks of how ZNH might have been “inspired by James Weldon Johnson’s 1922 call for African American writers to do ‘something’ for black dialect like John Millington Synge ‘did for the Irish,’ Hurston and some of the other, typically younger, writers of the period challenged long-held assumptions about art, language, and politics.”

My favourite story was “John Redding Goes to Sea” possibly because it’s the first and I was thrilled in that initial moment to find myself back in the rhythm of Hurston’s dialogue and syntax, which slows me immediately and reminds me just how powerful voice can be (but also because there’s something unexpected in the story and I appreciate being surprised).

It was also interesting to see her experiments with form and to see Eatonville featured so boldly on the page.

“Being the only girl in the family, of course she must wash the dishes, which she did in intervals between frolics with the dogs.” (From “Drenched in Light”…ok, maybe that’s my favourite.)

Contents: 21 stories, from “John Redding Goes to Sea” to “The Fire and the Cloud”

Reading Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki (1949-1986) is a little like watching old episodes of “The Twilight Zone”. There are so many concepts and possibilities that would have been mind-blowingly exciting and strange when they were written but, by now, lots of others have wrestled them to the page. A society in which men are subservient to women and nearly invisible, people raised inside hypothesising that they’re confined to an old bomb shelter while the world carries on outside, medical procedures that manage people’s painful memories, aliens from outer space learning to coexist on what’s left of Earth with all its troubles: iconic themes. All with the focus on relationships and how ordinary people’s daily lives unfold. How lucky that Verso published this collection in 2021 though, because her stories weren’t included in Pamela Sargent’s classic Women of Wonder series (which collected works by women SF writers from the 1950s onwards) so this is a fine introduction to her work, and a novel will be [was, it’s here] published this fall.

“Fah-thur?”
“It means a male parent.”
“Wait, a man can be a parent?” I was taken aback and kind of appalled, and my voice came out sounding idiotic. Did that mean that being involved in reproduction was all it took to be a parent?”
“Uh-huh. You must have a male parent yourself,” he said calmly.
“No way. I don’t even have a mother.”

Contents: Women and Women; You May Dream, Night Picnic, That Old Seaside Club, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Forgotten, Terminal Boredom
Translators: Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi, and Helen O’Horan

Disruption is a collection of futurist short stories by African writers (edited by Rachel Zadok with Karina Szczurek and Jason Mykl Snyman, published in 2021 by Short Story Day Africa in conjunction with Catalyst Press—I haven’t been able to locate a link for purchasing information) which I read over several weeks.

“Objects in the Mirror are Stranger than they Appear” (by Kevin Magotsi from Botswana) made me wince and laugh too.

Alithnayn Abdulkareem’s “Before We Die Unwritten” gave me nightmares set in that imagined world.

The plain speech and simple premise of “Shelter” (by Mbozi Haimbe from Zambia) caught my attention straight off: “August was the month for dust storms, not January. But here we were, dust instead of rain right in the middle of the wet season.”

And the inquisitive and insistent tone of “Lycaon Pictus” (by Liam Brickhill from Zimbabwe) held my attention taut.

Anyone who enjoys reading anthologies to find new authors for their TBR will love this collection.

“As they went, the boy would often ask for explanations on why things were this way, rather than that. Why is there grass around the well, but nowhere else? Why can’t they dig a well closer to home? She barely knew the answers to these things herself, but was clever enough to create passable tales of origins and wherefores for the youngster.”

And you? Any short stories lately?