Abi-Nakhoul, Atwood, Brinkley, Graves, Kemick, Nunez, Segal

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 three familiar writers and also explored four new-to-me story writers.

Before I forget (as I often do), I’ve already posted about other short stories.

As in November, when I read from Margaret Atwood for MARM.

Dancing Girls:
Training,
Lives of the Poets,
Giving Birth, and
Dancing Girls.

And Old Babes in the Woods:
My Evil Mother,
Impatient Griselda,
The Dead Interview, and
Bad Teeth.

And I finished the stories in Richard Kelly Kemick’s debut collection (some of which still haunt me today).

They were published by Biblioasis, which international readers might appreciate knowing is an independent Canadian press that not only deals with top-notch Canadians but are a reliable source of the global fiction and translations too. 

As standalone stories, I read Abi-Nakhoul’s story in The Walrus (here) and Sigrid Nunez’s story in The New Yorker (here, author interview here). These are pictured at the top of this page.

Abi-Nakhoul’s “Smokehouse” opens with a tense and dramatic scene observed from a distance, so that readers feel separated from the action by glass—like visiting it in prison and having already hung up the phone. To counter that, there’s something informal about the voice as the narrator sidles up to the situation, describing the scene in prose that is both laconic and lyrical, as an apartment building goes up in flames. The access point for readers is sensory detail, but it’s more claustrophobic than intimate. Never mind, it’s over quickly. But it’s the kind of scene that could linger, which suits this refractive exploration of trauma.

Nunez’s “Greensleeves” draws readers in immediately, through conversation and detail at a party. A woman has a “gleaming manicure, each copper-colored nail for a Japanese beetle”. Things happen and perspectives shift, until it’s hard to track what happens because perspectives differ. (In the middle, there’s a cute comic about a Labradoodle.) She has a brother who’s experiencing psychosis and anything could happen, she says: “Like those people tapped for years in a coma who suddenly one day wake up.” But all the characters who are at the party (and not institutionalised) are also trapped, all in different stages of sleeping and being awakened.

Just the cover of Jamel Brinkley’s Witness (2023) would have caught my eye, but it probably landed on my TBR because of one of the American Best Books listings or prize listings.  The “highest quality” blurb on the cover is no exaggeration: these are polished and sophisticated literary works. Every sentence has heft: if you have borrowed this collection, and you want to give each story its due, this one’s going back to the library late. Having said that, the emotional heft simmers well beneath the surface, so you must bring attention to these works first, must invite the emotion to resonate within you. Like Patricia Engel’s, Gina Berriault’s (who’s epigraphed here), and Randall Kenan’s, these are stories to reread.

“The driving soothes, it casts a spell. The hours are long and my feet still hurt, but the days fill up with these harmless glimpses into other people’s lives. And they manage, by a sort of alchemy, to add up to something that feels close to good. I like the daily practice of being polite, of exchanging pleasantries like flipped nickels. Kindness without consequence. I smile and the strangers of the city smile, and then, until next time, we absolutely forget about each other.” Bartow Station

Contents: Blessed Deliverance, The Let-Out, Comfort, Arrows, Sahar, Bystander, The Happiest House on Union Street, That Particular Sunday, Bartow Station, Witness

I went searching for Allison Graves’ Soft Serve (2023) because I loved her story in Biblioasis’ 2024 Best Stories (edited by Lisa Moore). If you’ve enjoyed short stories by Shashi Bhat and Madeleine Thien, Souvankham Thammavongsa and Deborah Willis, you’ll probably devour these. Her usually-ordinary and unremarkable prose is occasionally punctuated with a perfect metaphor or a quietly profound observation: she manages the balance so very well. When I note a passage, it’s sometimes to capture a plot element or meaningful moment as a memory aid, sometimes it’s about the use of language, and sometimes it’s because a passage conveniently encapsulates the author’s various skills. With Graves, I narrowed down my quotation options to nine and only picked this one because I think there should be more stories with parrots in their titles. (Published by the Canadian indie
Breakwater Books https://breakwaterbooks.com/products/soft-serve)

“She had done mushrooms with her parents’ gardener or slept with her chemistry professor in his wife’s Kia Soul. But over time I realized that she wasn’t a liar, she was just different than I was. Things were easier for her. She could climb hills without breathing heavily and she knew how to put her hand on a boy’s arm. She was like a rare bird. A parrot, maybe.”

Contents: Nineteen stories, beginning with “Ceiling Like the sky” and ending with “Stars”

Lytton First Nations writer G.A. Grisenthwaite gathers an assortment of short and long stories in Tales for Late Night Bonfires (2023). Voice is such a keystone in these works, it’s easy to see how a performance would add to their enjoyment, but even flat-on-the-page they’re charismatic, occasionally mesmerising.

One is a proper novella and it begins like this: “This might not be the story you want to hear, but I will tell it anyways. Stay or move on to the next one. I will wait.”

What he means is, he will wait for you to discover it’s the last story in the collection, and that sense of back-and-forth is where the charm resides. Whether Kristofferson’s or Joplin’s versions of “Me and Bobby McGee” is better, the antics of the Proudman family in the Australian dramedy “Offspring” (currently airing on Netflix and one of my favourites), spinner racks of postcards next to the register in the gas station: the dynamic here should be trademarked too because many will try to duplicate.

Contents: Splatter Pattern, ball lightnin, Roadkill, Three Bucks, Little Trees®, Catching Farts, Snḱýép and His Shiny New Choker, The One about he Boy and the Grey Squirrel, SPAM® Stew and the MALM Minimalist Bedroom Set from IKEA®, A Wager, The Sunshine Ranbow Peace Ranch, Gramps v The real Santa™

In Lore Segal’s Ladies’ Lunch and Other Stories (2023), nine are about the ladies who lunch—all seeming so real that we can’t help but imagine they’re friends of the author, who died recently at the age of ninety-six (if you’d like to read her New York Times obit, I’ll happily share one of the “gift articles” that come with my subscription)—and seven are the Other Stories.

They’re spare, simple stories: the kind you might imagine on the back page of a magazine. Many are preoccupied by themes of time and ageing, memory and change, and some characters respond with resignation and others with determination, some express their fervor and others their frustration. Bookish Beck mentioned earlier this season that she found them rather slight, so when I picked up the collection that’s just what I expected, and perhaps that’s why I enjoyed them so much. Her insights are timeless, like this:

You and I used to talk and talk. Wait. Hold on. I had to go and find Jane Austen. Here: this is Emma thinking about Mrs. Weston, the friend ‘interested in every pleasure, every scheme of hers, to whom she could speak every thought as it arose.’ Bessie, that was you and me, until you learned to say ‘Anyway,’ which being interpreted can only mean, ‘When you stop telling me what you are telling me, we can get back to what I was saying.

Contents: Sixteen stories, starting with “Ruth, Frank and Dario” and ending with “Ladies’ Zoom”

As always, I’d love to hear about the short stories you’ve recently read or that you’re planning to read.

But here’s a question that anyone can answer: from title alone, which of these individual stories gets you curious?