With its complexly interlinked characters (among them a ballerina exiled to Siberia and a Chechen war-veteran-turned-drug-dealer); recurring objects passed, like a series of batons, from tale to tale (an unplayable mixtape, a painting of a Chechen landscape); and near-century-long narrative arc (from the Stalin-era Soviet Union to Putin’s Russia) splayed against a backdrop of systemic corruption and personal futility, Anthony Marra’s new book presents as if it were the love child of David Mitchell and George Orwell. Read more…
short stories
ACT NORMAL
by Greg Hollingshead
When at one point, the narrator of “Sense of an Ending,” a story smack in the middle of Greg Hollingshead’s crackerjack new collection, Act Normal, announces “It’s in a reader’s interest to close down on the meaning as soon as she can. She needs to be able to move on as soon as possible to the next story,” it’s hard not to take it personally. That’s because in these twelve non-sequiturish tales of miscommunication, uncanniness and altered states, Hollingshead (currently director of the Banff Centre Writing Studio and a G-G Award for Fiction-winner for his 1995 collection The Roaring Girl) makes a sport of denying exactly this to his readers, as if “meaning” were a piece of fantasy real estate and he were Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glenn Ross urging us, minus the verbal abuse, to “always be closing.” Read more…
ENGLAND AND OTHER STORIES
by Graham Swift
It’s been a recent trend in filmmaking to withhold the picture’s title until the very end, as if the audience had been entirely in the dark about what it was watching until the credits rolled. The title story of England and Other Stories, Graham Swift’s first book of short stories in 30 years (all of them previously unpublished), functions similarly—but less coyly. It is the collection’s caboose, but also its coxswain. Read more…
THE STRANGE CASE OF RACHEL K
by Rachel Kushner
When we’re in love, we want to learn every little thing about the object of our love: childhood dreams, adolescent heartbreaks, chips versus chocolate. Since the publication of her two remarkable novels, 2008’s Telex from Cuba and 2013’s The Flamethrowers, the American writer Rachel Kushner (who is the only author to have a first and second novel nominated for the National Book Award) has earned legions of fiercely adoring fans. It’s no surprise then that the three stories collected in this slim, sub-hundred-page volume, The Strange Case of Rachel K, all of which appeared previously in various literary journals, have suddenly been made available to a love-struck readership hungry for origin stories. Read more…
THE FREEDOM IN AMERICAN SONGS
by Kathleen Winter
This is a big year for Kathleen Winter. In the space of a month she has doubled her career output with fraternal twin books, neither of which is—like her hit Annabel—a novel. Boundless, a memoir documenting a 2010 voyage she took through the Northwest Passage (and which lines up eerily well with the recent Franklin Expedition discoveries) is her first work of non-fiction, The Freedom in American Songs her second short story collection. Read more…
CHEZ L’ARABE
by Mireille Silcoff
Journalist Mireille Silcoff began writing the nine Montreal-based stories in her debut collection, Chez l’arabe, during the years she was left “deeply bedridden” and immobile with an alarming neurological condition that caused her spinal fluid to leak uncontrollably. Like a prisoner determinedly chipping her way out of her cell with an espresso spoon, Silcoff unleashed the world that had evolved in her head (her condition meant that her brain was often unsuspended) through daily, fifteen-minute writing sessions. Read more…
FUNNY ONCE
by Antonya Nelson
Mavis Gallant once said, famously, that a Canadian “is someone who has a logical reason to think he is one.” You could say much the same thing about family in Antonya Nelson’s new collection of stories. By the time we encounter them, most have been blown apart and reassembled in functional but unorthodox ways, as a child might do with Mr. Potato Head figure. Often, this has little to do with blood. Read more…
JULIET WAS A SURPRISE
by Bill Gaston
Novelist, dramatist, poet and short story writer Bill Gaston is a quadruple threat, but it’s with his short story collections that he’s had the most measurable success (his 2002 collection Mount Appetite was nominated for a Giller Prize, 2006’s Gargoyles for the Governor General’s Award). Gaston’s work has a number of recurring themes, yet the range of situations with which he explores these consistently astonishes; ditto for his ability to temper the macabre and the cringeworthy with humour. Read more…
OH, MY DARLING
by Shaena Lambert
“You love to read myths and fairy tales; stories with dark centres. The children always perk up, lean forward. Why? Because something is at stake: death has entered the building.” That something must be at stake is as fine a description as any for what makes a story work; it’s also, in a way, the nexus between fiction and life. Borrowing from corporate parlance (not necessarily a good idea), you might say that this makes readers narrative “stakeholders.” And yet that is what makes Shaena Lambert’s second collection of stories so fiercely good: she makes us feel we personally have an stake in each of her short, sharp tales. Read more…
ALL THE RAGE
by A.L. Kennedy
Anyone wondering what really constitutes literary risk-taking in the wake of the knickers-twisting dustup prompted by humourist Gary Shteyngart’s recent comments on the subject should consider the bar set by Scottish writer A.L. Kennedy. Kennedy is what you’d call a bona fide risk-taker, and I’m not just referring to her writing. Almost a decade ago, she did one of the risk-takiest things you can do when she embarked on a side career in standup comedy at almost forty. Read more…
DARK LIES THE ISLAND
by Kevin Barry
Dark Lies the Island is Irish writer Kevin Barry’s second collection of stories and his first book since winning this year’s International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his debut novel City of Bohane. He’s writer whose fortunes might have been quite different in the pre-Google era, “a screaming barny,” “brass monkeys weather” and “a fretful blow-in” being expressions not readily found in most dictionaries. Even dimensional lumber is here defamiliarized; in Ireland one gets hit over the head with a four-be-two, not a two-by-four, apparently. Read more…
A PERMANENT MEMBER OF THE FAMILY
by Russell Banks
In one of the stories in Russell Banks’ sixth collection, a churlish heart transplant recipient reluctantly agrees to meet his donor’s wife then capitulates to an unusual request from her at a public monument. The story ends with this line about his nurse, who’s been observing the scene from afar: “After a few seconds she walked back to the driver’s side, got into the vehicle and continued to wait.” Read more…
DIRTY LOVE
by Andre Dubus III
The imperial sounding “III” at the end of Andre Dubus’ name used to be necessary so readers and publishers wouldn’t confuse him with his father, the late, beloved short-story writer Andre Dubus II, though the young Andre’s fame has long since eclipsed the elder’s (his 1999 novel, House of Sand and Fog, became an Oprah-endorsed bestseller and Oscar-nominated movie). Dirty Love is Dubus’ second book of short stories. He’s also written three novels and, most recently, a memoir, Townie, which went a long way toward illuminating the grim preoccupations that have dominated his work, most of which is set in the scrappy New England towns where he grew up. Read more…
MIDDLE MEN
by Jim Gavin
The idea of the middleman has long been synonymous with money wasted; we all know they’re something to be cut out. Though “middleman” still conjures someone in a brown suit and fedora with a locked briefcase, the middleman most likely to suffer if you buy this book (which you should) is your local bookstore. Read more…
THE MINIATURE WIFE AND OTHER STORIES
by Manuel Gonzales
In “Pilot. Copilot. Writer,” the first story in Austin, Texas-based Manuel Gonzales’ debut collection, a plane hijacked for no apparent reason circles Dallas for 20 years. Anyone who’s flown anywhere recently knows that sitting in economy class for just a few hours is nightmare aplenty, of course. But the horror that Gonzales really wants to exploit is terrestrial society’s loss of interest in the captives after only a week of vigils and breathless news reports. Read more…
PEOPLE WHO DISAPPEAR
by Alex Leslie
The title of Alex Leslie’s affecting first collection of stories also serves as a unifying theme. Set in towns and cities, and along the winding coastal highways and obscure logging roads of British Columbia, these are indeed stories about people who disappear – sometimes by choice, sometimes not, and in a variety of ways: literally, figuratively, emotionally, historically. Read more…
PULSE
by Julian Barnes
Marriage and relationships are the main preoccupation of Pulse, Julian Barnes’ third short story collection and seventeenth book. In most cases, these are the relationships of middle-aged, middle-class British people much like Julian Barnes himself, or awkward second attempts bearing the patina of past betrayals, divorces, and personal failings. Read more…
BETTER LIVING THROUGH PLASTIC EXPLOSIVES
by Zsuzsi Gartner
Swift famously described satire as: “a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.” Zsuzsi Gartner has been touted as a satirical writer, and to the degree that her latest collection of short stories—a follow-up to 1999’s All the Anxious Girls on Earth—heaps scorn on a wide range of targets, the definition fits. Schadenfreude, self-righteousness, wanton materialism, hypocrisy: Gartner’s characters’ vices are many. The problem is that these characters are so extreme, their narratives so consistently and deeply unreliable, that most readers will be hard pressed to see anyone—let alone themselves—in them. Read more…
THIS CAKE IS FOR THE PARTY
by Sarah Selecky
Although many characters inhabit Sarah Selecky’s engaging debut collection of short stories, they tend to drift toward a certain default sensibility: urban-dwelling females in their mid-twenties to thirties poised on the cusp of marriage and motherhood. Characters, that is, with a sense of possibility to their lives but who still struggle valiantly to find the right path. Read more…
NOTHING RIGHT
by Antonya Nelson
The qualities of Antonya Nelson’s short story writing are not what you’d call indefinable or elusive — they are, rather, stunningly concrete and tangible. This is a writer who seems to ghost-write other peoples’ lives: writes lines we wish we could write, articulates ideas felt but only haltingly spoken. The words she uses to do this are chosen with the fastidiousness and perfection of poetry, yet this is a writer who practically wallows in her prose. It’s dirt, but clean dirt. And she does it all flagrantly, in words that can be read again and again without losing their force or wit. Read more…