Chang, Estima, Graves, Ma, and Teebi

Appealing to a variety of reading tastes: Downright Disorienting, Superb and Strange

For the second time, this different format for the Quarterly Stories. For most of the collections, summarising in five sentences, followed by a quotation. Except for one, one that’s made me think while reading, frequently, of other readers who would enjoy these stories as much as I have. And I’m also including a single story that’s available to read online. (This month, one of the stories from the exceptional collection happens to be available online as well.)

You might remember, I began this reading year with the Best of anthologies from Biblioasis, including the short stories selected by Lisa Moore (whose fiction I’ve also enjoyed, short and long). The short story “Ceiling Like the sky” by Allison Graves, in which nothing happens and everything happens, got me hunting for more of her work and now I have her debut Soft Serve en route. These anthologies have been such an unexpectedly great source of new reading material. So much so, that I’ve made room in the stacks for more (which I’ll share in the Autumn Quarterly).

Anyone who enjoyed Ling Ma’s Severance (you must, if you appreciate the idea of a workplace novel with a twist) will find the same kind of clear-eyed but wholly unsettling storytelling in her 2022 collection Bliss Montage (2022).

Ordinary things happen, like a character tastes tamarind for the first time or stands barefoot in a summer dress; in the same story, one character’s dialogue is comprised of $$$ rather than letters, and another character is living with 100 of her ex-boyfriends.

Time is pleated, shifting between past and present, and reality is shifts too: “The dream was different in that it wasn’t actually a dream, but a memory that replayed in my sleep.”

G gives a better high than E, a town looks like a Brueghel painting, Nina Simone plays in a hotel lobby, and people watch the film “Ghost World” and read the short fiction of Lydia Davis.

I read these too quickly and felt uneasy afterwards.

“Just looking at New York on the screen, the city was made new for me again, and I saw it as I once did in high school: romantic, shabby, not totally gentrified, full of promise. It made me wistful for the illusion of New York more than for its actuality, after having lived there for five years.”

Contents: Los Angeles, Oranges, G, Yeti Lovemaking, Returning, Office Hours, Peking Duck, Tomorrow

Here’s a contender for my own Best-of notes, a collection so wholly and consistently good that I might, even yet, write an entire post about the stories: Saeed Teebi’s Her First Palestinian (2022). This statement from the title story reflects the thoughts of a woman whom the narrator is dating: “But some of it seemed to stem from her feeling that she had been duped: that all her life, she had been taught one thing, when the reality I was revealing to her was something far different.” She’s filling the gap between her expectations and her reality, but even more delightful is the sense that not only Teebi’s characters and narrators do this, but that a similar kind of curiosity and self-awareness fuels his own work as a storyteller. Which quietly pulls readers alongside quiet, sometimes innocuous, transformations—invites inside, even, to allow their own perspectives to shift. He sets scenes, populates them, makes them stick: he makes it look so easy.

“A frequent sight: Shareef at the kitchen counter, chopping ingredients or stirring a pot for dinner, while one of / his sisters kept him company on a laptop screen, her excitable Arabic breaking up every now and then over a bad connection.”

Contents: Her First Palestinian; Do Not Write about the King; Cynthia; The body; Ushanka; At the Benefit; Woodland; The Reflected Sky; Enjoy Your Life, Capo

Christine Estima’s The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society (2023) moves from 1860 to 2020, from the 19th-century Middle East to 20th-century Montreal to 21st-century Toronto, chronicling one Arab family, with a family tree in the front (don’t peer too closely: avoid spoilers), and their experience of emigration and immigration. It’s such an ambitious collection that the effort occasionally seeps through, but Estima’s got a great eye for story. And if sometimes her love of words overswells (to an unnecessarily poetic final sentence, or an overly rich dramatic scene), readers will appreciate her love of character and her scenic details. It’s easy to imagine them as short films. Fierce women are abundant but also relatable; they make mistakes, and they wish reality was otherwise—and sometimes they remake their worlds.

“Jews from Europe and Arabs exiled from the Nakba mingle like close cousins here. I would miss them all so much were I ever to leave. But truth be told, I miss other people even more. My people. People I once knew and even the familiar faces of people who look like me.”

Contents: The Castle of Montreal. The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society, Ortona, Montreal Awaits You, The Belly Dancer, the Last Cigarette, Fairview Mall, The Power of the Dog, A Degree of Suffering Is Required, Blink, Rue Berri, Your Hands Are Blessed, Mabrouk

If K-Ming Chang’s Gods of Want was invited out, for after-work drinks, a couple of the quieter girls clustered in the bathroom would whisper that it was too much, the glitter of its laughter and retold anecdotes still audible from the inner-workings of the stalls.

This 2022 collection opens with “Auntland”, a cacophony of single-sentence descriptions of Aunties that nobody has EVER had. (One of the most ordinary Aunts is this one: “I had an aunt who said home is the temperature of an armpit.”) After fewer than ten pages, you’ll need to set aside the collection, simply to find respite.

The entire collection, even read over a few weeks, leaves you a little breathless. A character in “Resident Aliens” could have been one of these aunts: “The thirteenth widow once worked as a whalesong writer, said she wrote whalesongs and recorded them on her phone and replayed them for whales, who learned the lyrics and sang along and popularized her songs.”

But K-Ming’s style is charismatic. But on closer examination, the over-the-topness holds up. As in “The La-La Store”: “There were composition books for school and furry-faced notebooks that clicked shut with magnets and put a plastic lock on your language.” It’s evocative and simple.

And even though there’s a lot of figurative language, some of it is remarkably effective. In the title story, “Mariela continued to scream, the radius of her voice expanding like a water ring.” And, in “Mandarin Speakers”: “She sings every night when the Sichuan opera’s on TV, her face painted thick as a scab.” It’s not so much a collection I enjoyed, as a collection that struck a nerve: one I’m glad to have read.

Contents: MOTHERS Auntland, The Chorus of Dead Cousins, Xífù, Mandarin Speakers, Anchor, The La-La Store; MYTHS Nüwa, Eating Pussy, Nine-Headed Birds, Dykes, Episodes of Hoarders (as scenes from your life), Homophone; MOTHS Resident Aliens, Virginia Slims, Mariela, Meals for the Mourners

Note: You can read “Xifù” online at Electric Literature, a story recommended by Bryan Washington. His reasons for selecting the story, particularly the last paragraph, ring true for me too.

Last week, I also wrote about Anuja Varghese’s Chrysalis, which has so many little awards stickers on it now, that they’ve begun to compete with the actual cover art.

And you? Any short stories lately?