The 2022 Short-Story Reading Thread

[Lakey]

Are you interested in short stories? Do you want to read more of them, or more of a certain kind, or just to get to know the form a little better? Join the Short-Story Reading Thread for the coming year—astonishingly, the fourth annual short-story reading thread.

In this thread we read and talk about short stories in all genres. Come tell us about the short stories you are reading. We will also share links to interesting stories to read on line, so if you’re not sure where to start, you can count on lots of suggestions.

In past threads, some intrepid readers shared a sentence or two (um, or more ) about each story they read. That is not required, though it is very much appreciated! The primary goal is to read, so don’t fret if you don’t have time or inclination to write something about every story. If you’re reading short stories, you belong here!

Also entirely optional: If you like, you can set challenges for yourself to read a certain number of stories, or more of a certain type of story, or a certain number of collections, or any criteria you like.

Happy reading!



Links to previous years’ threads: 2021, 2020, 2019

 

[Lakey]

I am still hoping to squeeze in one or two stories today to top off last year‘s thread. But in the meantime, my goals for 2022…. I am expecting to have a rather busy year, for various reasons, so I don’t think I’ll set quite as ambitious a goal as last year (which I didn’t meet, anyway). I’m going to pull back to 100, which seems solidly doable for me but also reminds me to go out of my way to read short stories now and again. I don’t think I quite need to push myself as hard to read 21st century short stories as in the past, but I’m going to keep up the goal of half the stories I read being recent in that sense. (I think last year I used 2010 as my cutoff, but really I think 21st century is a good enough criterion for my purposes.) So here we go:

0/100 short stories read, 0/50 from the 21st century

 

[dickson]

I’d like to nominate the short stories of Jonathan Howard as a source of pleasure that I revisit often. His necromancer noir Johannes Cabal has a series to himself, as do the Mancunian misfit wild talents of The Goon Squad series.

Then there is Mojito Doomsday. For my money it has one of the most devastating closing paragraphs of any short piece I’ve read (spoiler alert):











”They say, yes. That war is over.”

 

[Chris P]

Oh, you know I'm all in for this. I fell well short of my 100 stories goal last year, so I'll set my goal at 75 this time--about two stories every three weeks.

Thanks for organizing once again, Lakey! And I look forward to seeing all of you in the discussions.

 

[Tocotin]

I failed my 2021 goal miserably (I blame everything but myself though, boring books are boring), but I'll be reading short stories this year too! I AM HERE! Lakey <3

 

[Humphrey Archer]

Sorry, I'm apparently addicted to doom-reading non-fiction and opinion pieces about the destruction of democracy, and don't have the energy to read anyone else's short stories but my own.

 

[Tocotin]

Oh by the way, I forgot to add, I'll be continuing reading the Queen Victoria's Book of Spells collection. It's a bit uneven, but I want to write more short stories this year, and it's so helpful to see how others approach writing historical short stories.

 

[Friendly Frog]

I'll be joining for another year as well. Last year I played it relatively safe, this year, now that I'm practically through my Pratchett comfort re-read, I am going to be just a tad more ambitious. So my challenge for 2022 will be to read 7 anthologies or collections with primarily writers I haven't read before.

 

[Lakey]

Okay getting started! I’m continuing on with 100 Years of Best American Short Stories. For the earlier years, Moore tended to select about three stories per decade. Now that I’m in the 80s, she’s gone up to five or six stories per decade. I’m not sure why—maybe it was felt that contemporary stories would sell better, or maybe she really thinks contemporary writers are doing more interesting work, or maybe focusing on contemporary writers makes it easier to include writers of color? At any rate, here are the last two stories of the 1980s.

1. Robert Stone, “Helping“ (1988)
I read this story a couple of days ago, but when I sat down to write this post I had to flip through a significant fraction of it before I remembered what happened in it. Superficially it’s about a Viet Nam veteran who now works as a therapist/counselor, who is a recovering alcoholic, and has a relapse. The story obviously didn’t engage my brain much, so I can’t really speak to its themes.

2. David Wong Louie, “Displacement” (1989)
This story is about a couple of Chinese immigrants who live with and work for a horrible elderly widow—the implication is that at least some of her horribleness is due to dementia and associated reduced inhibitions, but some of it is inherent to her class and position. The wife, who bears the brunt of the bad behavior, wants to leave the employment and get a place of their own. She is the protagonist of the story, and what’s most interesting about this story is the focus on how her status and power is diminished relative to her pre-immigration life and relative to her husband, and how she grapples with that. In the story she is referred to only as Mrs Chow, although she is the protagonist. She was from an aristocratic family that fled during the Cultural Revolution. She had an English-language education in Hong Kong. Yet in the U.S., in their dealings with others, her husband (whose English is very poor) is presumed to be the one to deal with; she sits silently while he struggles through a meeting with a property manager in the place they would like to rent. The property manager is what one might uncharitably call “white trash,” and the subtle undercurrent of Mrs Chow’s mingled contempt and fascination toward her makes for interesting dynamics.

Up next — one of my favorite authors of short stories, Alice Munro.

2/100 short stories read, 0/50 from the 21st century

 

[Chris P]

I'm finally getting into the Best American Short Stories 2021 that I got back in October. Jesmyn Ward, this year's editor, is off to a great start with some compelling (and not overly long) stories with great characterizations, although of the three I've read so far, I'm not sure I really understand two of them.

1. To Buffalo Eastward, by Gabriel Bump. A woman traveling solo, apparently either constantly intoxicated or suffering a mental illness, or both, makes her way from Ann Arbor toward Buffalo, meeting a like-minded trio in Cleveland. Nope, I didn't get this one at all, nor why it was the lead story of the anthology.

2. The Miracle Girl, by Rita Chang-Eppig. Xiao Xue's literally holier-than-thou sister Xiao Chun becomes afflicted with stigmata after her family flees communist China for Taiwan. Everyone rushes to exploit Xiao Chun for their own purposes, while Xiao Xue becomes increasingly and insanely jealous of her perfect sister. Lots going on here in a few pages, and a great story.

3. Our Children, by Vanessa Cuti. The narrator and her boyfriend Dan, both married to other people when they met, rent a mountain cabin taking along both her and his kids, only to ditch them in the middle of the night to romp at home uninhibited. It took me a while to understand this one.

 

[Friendly Frog]

First one up for my short story challenge is Pulphouse Fiction Magazine's anthology Aliens Among Us. (ten stories) A bit of a misnomer in a way. All stories do handle aliens and humans mixing but in only one of the stories does it turn out at all well for the humans. Two others are open-ended enough to optimistically consider things working out okay for the human main characters. I was expecting a more diverse mix on that aspect. There have got to be encounters with aliens that turn out okay or good. I found that lacking here. It felt more like I was reading an anthology titled Aliens misbehaving.

That nibble aside, there are some interesting concepts here to enjoy. Lisa Silverthorne's story Planet Suds and the Sockpocalypse, which deserves a mention if alone for the title, features an alien invasion, one mismatched sock at the time. It's fun, even if the exagerated teenage tone of the narrator started to grate a little after a while.

Jerry Oltrion's short, Suicide by UFO, starts strongly with the main character dressed as a cow in a pasture at night, hoping to attract extraterrestrial attention, which he does. He just doesn't like what he learns so he sets out to make things right.

Time Cop by Patrick Alan Mammay deserves a mention: Two guys fool around with technology and open a wormhole to another world. At the same time aliens raid the lobster tank of a nearby restaurant. Are the two items connected? Well...
This one I thought best of the lot even though it somewhat ironically

Spoiler

does not actually involve any actual alien at all.

____

Second is a collection of 4 short stories by Brigid Collins: Strength and Chaos, Mischief & Poise. I was a little disappointed by this one. For some reason it read like stories that a kid might make up that greatly delight and entertain the kid, but leave others a bit lost and confused with too many adult 'why this' and 'why that' unanswered questions.

For example, the first story Honed Sharp and Ready starts with a declawed cat abandoned in a shelter and en route to be euthanised (or possibly dissected? it was not clear) but ends with a flaming lion, weird magic and a village full of pointed hatted witches? The image of a fire lion and a water panther fighting is a nice one, but otherwise the story left me quite confused.

The Sugimori Sisters and the Astronomical Allergy Kerfuffle was in the same vein. It starts out with two sisters going to a science fair, but ends with clones, genius kids, teleporting cats and cardboard rockets and space stations that are apparently not make-belief. The sort of thing child me would have loved to come up with in day dreams but which makes adult me just smile uncertainly.

Plus points for having a young witch named Robin Weatherwax in the third story Claws at Hand, though. But the rest of it didn't quite make sense and this story specifically seemed to have lots of people doing specific things Just Because. Might have been just me, I'm not great in picking up subtlety.

2/7 anthologies or collections from writers I haven't read before. And we're off!

 

[Lakey]

Sounds like fun, @Friendly Frog ! I’m glad to have someone here talking about SFF. You have me curious about that “Time Cop” story for sure.

I’ve carried on with 100 Years of BASS, working my way through the 90s. We’re now into stories that were published not just in my lifetime, but during my adult life. That feels different, somehow, from reading the early and mid 20th century giants.

3. Alice Munro, “Friend of My Youth” (1991)
I didn’t start reading Alice Munro until last year but I’ve been devouring her since then. She has such a marvelous delicate touch, does a wonderful job with the intense stories of ordinary life. Very little happens in her stories that feels dramatic, yet the emotions she stirs up are seething, and she uses metaphors so deftly. Anyway most interesting about this story is its structure, which is a kind of story within a story, where the two stories inform and and illuminate each other in subtle ways. There is a narrator, an adult woman, remembering tales her mother (now dead) told of a family she lived with before she was married, and particularly of Flora, a stoic woman from a stern Christian sect. So the narrator is here relating stories that her mother told her, if that makes sense, but acknowledging her own embellishments and additions to them, and ruminating on how they are different from the embellishments her mother might add. The mother’s relationship with Flora, Flora’s relationship with her family, the narrator’s relationship with her mother are all illuminated in oblique ways.

4. Mary Gaitskill, “The Girl on the Plane” (1993)
Oof, what an absolute gut-punch of a story. Just loved this one. Like the Munro story it uses a kind of indirect narration, or an interweaving of two stories. At the surface, a man on an airplane is attracted to the woman sitting next to him. But she stirs up memories for him of a girl he knew in high school, and just in the course of their conversation, a complex of rationalizations and self-delusions he had constructed around his conduct with the high-school girl unravels, culminating in a disastrous spontaneous confession. Talk about a short-story capturing a moment of change — this is a story to study.

5. Jamaica Kincaid, “Xuela,” (1995)
This one didn’t work for me. It’s not just that everyone in it is angry and cruel and unloving, including the narrator, who is an adult reflecting on things that happened when she was a small child. It’s also that the narrator keeps telling us, over and over again, that everyone around her is angry and cruel and unloving. At least I think that’s what it is. It was a bitter experience to read, without an ounce of tenderness anywhere, and unlike the Gaitskill story, where there is a momentous internal transformation for the protagonist, I can’t find any such change here—the little girl starts angry and lonely and finishes angry and lonely, and that’s that. Maybe it’s just too bleak for me at this time.

Onward!

5/100 short stories read, 0/50 from the 21st century

 

[mrsmig]

I keep forgetting to come here and officially throw my hat in the ring. I'm aiming for 50 short stories in 2022, to make a nice neat trifecta with my pledged 50 books and 50 poems. I had the same goals in 2021, and met them with some room to spare, but rather than up the ante I'll be trying to get back to writing. Again.

 

[Chris P]

4. "The Rest of us," by Jenzo Duque. Hispanic children in Chicago grow up, discovering that cooking meth pays well better than going to high school, dodging clueless cops who don't think to check the roof, and turning on their former benefactor. I thought this was a fairly standard story until the final page, which put a lot of what I thought was so-so writing into a new light. Well done, Jenzo!

5. "Escape from the Dysphesiac People," by Brandon Hobson. A Native American teen is forcibly removed from his Oklahoma reservation to a "training school" far from home.

6. "Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain," by Jamil Jan Kochai. A teen Afghan refugee in the U.S. scrimps and saves to buy the latest Metal Gear Solid war shoot-em-up video game on the day it comes out. The game takes place in his native village, which he dimly remembers from his early youth, realistic to where he finds his own house, his much-younger father and long-ago murdered uncle, still very much alive--for now. This story is a welcome twist on the "player gets sucked into video game" plotline, makes the best use of second-person POV I've read in a long time (I was over halfway through before I noticed the 2nd, which I usually don't like), and is one of the stories that keeps me buying anthologies and at the same time makes me despair of ever being good enough to write something like this.

 

[mrsmig]

I felt like reading something a little offbeat, so I picked up The Green Man: Tales From the Mythic Forest, a compilation of poems and short stories centered on mythical beings of the natural world. I'll just chat about the stories here.

1. "Grand Central Park," by Delia Sherman. The voice seems a bit young for what's supposed to be an 11th-grader (17 years old or thereabout), but this story wasn't bad - about a young woman who used to see fairies as a child encountering more threatening beings in New York's Central Park. It bounced along briskly, had a nice twist on some standard fairy lore and overall, was an enjoyable start on my 50-story journey.

 

[mrsmig]

I read a wonderful story this morning from thedeadlands.com, Daria Lavelle's "The Aftertastes." It's about food and the afterlife. Wonderful, sensual imagery and wordplay. And you can read it for free!

2. "The Aftertastes," by Daria Lavelle.

Continuing with The Green Man anthology:

3. "Daphne," by Michael Cadnum. A retelling of the old tale of the woman changed into a tree to protect her from the unwanted attention of the god Apollo. It's nicely written, but I was hoping for a fresh take on the story. I didn't get it.

4. "Somewhere in My Mind There Is a Painting Box," by Charles de Lim. A young woman finds the paintbox of one of a pair of artists who disappeared in the woods twenty years earlier. Not a bad story, but overlong, and I kept feeling like it was probably connected to other work by the same author (and it is, which probably accounts for its incomplete feel).

5. "Among the Leaves So Green," by Tanith Lee. A gorgeous story about embattled and embittered sisters who flee to the woods to find their hearts' desire.

6. "Hunter's Moon," by Patricia A. Mckillip. Not a bad story, albeit overlong, about a girl, her brother and some odd neighbors.

7. "Charlie's Away," by Midori Snyder. Another overlong and somewhat predictable tale, this one about a young man, still grieving the loss of his baby sister years before and fearing his future, finding solace among the trees.

 

[Friendly Frog]

Sounds like fun, @Friendly Frog ! I’m glad to have someone here talking about SFF. You have me curious about that “Time Cop” story for sure.

You're welcome. SFF is my main interest in short stories. Followed by cat stories and cosy mysteries. So you will undoubtedly get more from me in that vein.

I do recommend 'Time Cop'. It was a fun story. The exasperated tone of the titular Time Cop was comedy gold.

 

[Lakey]

You're welcome. SFF is my main interest in short stories. Followed by cat stories and cosy mysteries. So you will undoubtedly get more from me in that vein.

Excellent! We've occasionally had folks talking about SFF stories in past threads as well. @mrsmig sometimes shares links from Daily Science Fiction, and I've read a couple of SFF collections and one-offs in the past few years.

Speaking of, I was clearing some stale email yesterday, and was irritated to see that I'd missed a Kindle deal offering the collected Ray Bradbury stories for only $1.99. By the time I noticed the email the deal was over and it was back to the regular price of $13.99 or whatever. I definitely would have bought it for $1.99 and let you all know about it as well--I'll keep an eye out, though, because sometimes books go on sale more than once!

 

[Chris P]

Plodding my way through the (mostly excellent) 2021 Best American Short Stories:

7. "Switzerland," by Nicole Krauss. An Jewish American teen studying in Switzerland during her father's sabbatical in the early 1980s describes her interactions with the collection of foreign-born fellows. She is particularly taken by Soraya, the edgy Iranian girl whose family fled following the fall of the Shah.

 

[Lakey]

6. Mary Gaitskill, “The Other Place,” (2011)
After the brick-to-the-head of that fantastic Gaitskill story I mentioned in my last post, I turned to the New Yorker Fiction podcasts* to see what there was of hers there. This story, read and discussed by Jennifer Egan (another contemporary writer I am very interested in), did not disappoint. Like the other story, the protagonist is a married man with some very sketchy behavior in his past. He is a man with violent fantasies about women. He also knows they are bad thoughts, and the story is all about what it’s like for him to try to be a good father to his son, knowing that he has this “other place” in his mind. (There is no explicit VAW in the story, if that’s a concern—a valid concern!) In her discussion of the story, Egan remarked on Gaitskill’s power to create a mood of menace, to show an ordinary, relatable person gripped by violent thoughts, to pull the reader into his perspective and make the reader understand and empathize with him. If you’ve ever heard me natter on about Patricia Highsmith, all of that will sound very familiar. (Yet in another edition of the podcast, the author Yiyun Li called Highsmith a “guilty pleasure,” even while choosing one of Highsmith’s stories to read and discuss on this very highbrow podcast! I could go on, but I’ll restrain myself.) At any rate I definitely have a new contemporary author to study closely!

I’ve linked to the story in the NYer archives, but I do recommend the podcast, because of the discussion. There are a number of other Mary Gaitskill stories lurking in the NYer archives as well.

6/100 short stories read, 1/50 from the 21st century



* I’ve talked about these before, but hey, new year, new thread, so I’ll say it again: New Yorker has two fiction podcasts: the weekly Writer’s Voice, which is simply the short story from each week’s issue, read by the author, and the the monthly Fiction podcast, in which an author is asked to pick someone else’s story from the NYer archives, reads it, and then has a marvelously lit-geeky discussion with the magazine’s fiction editor. I can’t recommend this podcast enough—the discussions are awesome.

 

[Lakey]

Speaking of science-fiction short stories, Ursula LeGuin's collection The Birthday of the World is on sale in Kindle format today for $1.99 (at least in the US).

This is a tough one for me to resist, though I am trying to enforce a small moratorium on book-buying until I read down some of my backlog. It's so little money for what promises to be a bunch of very good stories (although, I made the same argument in persuading myself to buy a collection of LeGuin essays not too long ago, and I wound up hating them...).

 

[mrsmig]

Grabbed it - thanks, Lakey! Although it'll have to wait until I finish the Green Man collection plus a book of Japanese short stories I picked up from the library. Which are on hold while I finish reading/rating 15 plays for a national college playwriting competition.

 

[Lakey]

I picked up the LeGuin also. Looking forward to talking about them with you later in the year!

Marching on in 100 Years of BASS: Finishing out the 90s.

7. Akhil Sharma, “If You Sing Like That for Me” (1996)
There is something I really don’t like about this story, something vaguely distasteful in the way this (male) author describes a woman‘s relationship with her husband. It’s a “quotidian life in India” story of the sort that were popular in the 90s (Jhumpa Lahiri was the queen of these) and it is supposed to be conveying the difficulty that this middle-class Delhi woman has in confining herself to the small, circumscribed life of her arranged marriage, while her sister goes abroad to get a PhD. In principle I should find all that fascinating—I spent so many years studying and writing about Indian popular culture that it ought to be right in my wheelhouse. I can see it as a movie by one of my favorite sensitive directors like Shyam Benegal or Gulzar, starring an actor like Shabana Azmi or Jaya Bachchan, with Kulbhushan Kharbanda as the not-unkind-but-not-engaged husband, and I would eat it up with a spoon. But as written, the story just rubbed me the wrong way, and I’m not sure I can articulate why. It might have just been too deep in the POV in a way that didn’t feel authentic to me; in a movie, even with a male director, the actor can bring her own sensibility, but in this story there is nothing but Sharma’s imagining of the vicissitudes of the woman’s desire for her husband, and something in it just doesn’t ring true.

8. Junot Diaz, “Fiesta, 1980” (1997)
I read this story once before in the wonderful textbook-cum-anthology Writing Fiction, and commented on it in the 2000 edition of this thread. I’m not sure the second reading gives me much more insight, although I do understand now that the car in which the boy gets sick was a gift to his father from the father’s lover, and so there is an interesting symbolic connection there between the woman who is causing all the strain in his family and the boy’s sickness. Having recently watched In the Heights (and listened to the soundtrack about 100 times) I also appreciated the slice-of-life picture of a Dominican immigrant community a bit more than the first time around.

I’m snowed in for the next two days here, so maybe I’ll read a few more stories.

8/100 short stories read, 1/50 from the 21st century

 

[mrsmig]

I finished The Green Man: Tales From the Mythic Forest last night. Not a bad anthology, all told, although it seemed aimed at a YA audience (or maybe it was coincidence that all the protags seemed to be college aged or younger).

8. "A World Painted by Birds," by Katherine Vaz. Nature is harnessed to battle a totalitarian state. Interesting, but it didn't stick with me.

9. "Grounded," by Nina Kiriki Hoffman. A girl and her mother move across country to meet the mom's internet boyfriend and his family. I was expecting doom and gloom, but this story had a refreshing twist.

10. "Overlooking," by Carol Emshwiller. Mythical forest creatures interact with humans. Another one that didn't stick with me.

11. "Fee, Fie, Foe, Et Cetera," by Gregory Maguire. This retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk, by the author of Wicked, is told from the viewpoint of Jack's mother and younger brother. I wasn't crazy about it; it felt overlong, and the different viewpoints didn't expand or refresh the story in an interesting way.

12. "Joshua Tree," by Emma Bull. A lonely teenager living in a desert town has a strange encounter and finds a friend. Although this was an interesting enough read, there was too much teenaged angst and not enough actual story for my taste.

13. "Ali Anugne O Chase (The Boy Who Was)," by Carolyn Dunn. A take on the Native American Deer Woman legend. Intriguing, and the language is beautiful.

14. "Remnants," by Kathe Koja. An odd little story, about a peculiar individual who makes art out of trash.

15. "The Pagodas of Ciboure," by M. Shayne Bell. This might be my favorite of the anthology: the story of a young Maurice Ravel and his encounters with the pagodas, which are not Chinese temples but creatures from French folklore, purported to be made of crystal, porcelain and jewels. (You can hear Ravel's "Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas" from his Mother Goose Suite here.) I love a story that teaches me something new.

16. "The Green World," by Jeffrey Ford. A creature of the forest takes revenge on a greedy king. Another interesting one, very well written.

Since I've finished reading all those plays I mentioned earlier, I can move on to my next anthology: Modern Japanese Short Stories. I note it was originally published in 1962, so we'll see just how "modern" it is.

 

[Lakey]

@mrsmig I'm interested in those Japanese short stories. Looking forward to what you have to say about them.

For me, a few more 100 Years of BASS -- into the 2000s.

9. Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Third and Final Continent” (2000)
I read The Interpreter of Maladies when it was fairly new, and while a general impression of the stories and their themes has lasted, not many specifics stuck with me over the years. This story, however, did. It's a very sweet and hopeful story (a good choice for the last story in the collection, which I saw it was when I just looked it up) about a man who emigrates from India to the United States (with some time in London in between) in the 1960s and forms a tender and unlikely bond with his centenarian landlady. Very charming and lovely story. However: I’ve been thinking lately about how little change one needs to make a story feel complete and satisfying (I mentioned this upthread when I talked about a Raymond Carver story), and in light of those thoughts I felt this story has an entirely unneeded epilogue. I would have liked it better, I think, if it ended sooner.

10. ZZ Packer, "Brownies," (2000)
I read this story a couple of years ago. I loved it then, and I loved it now. Here’s what I said about in the 2020 thread: “An absolutely lovely story about cruelty, kindness, punching up and punching down. A group of black Brownies (junior girl scouts) picks a fight with a group of white Brownies at a campsite. The dynamics within the group of black girls are fascinating and complex. I was happy to find a link to this story to share with all of you -- I recommend it.”

11. Sherman Alexie, "What You Pawn I Will Redeem," (2004)
Another really nice story. In this one, a homeless Native American man finds his grandmother’s ceremonial regalia in a pawn shop, and strikes a deal with the shop owner, who gives him 24 hours to rustle up the money. He then has a number of adventures around Seattle with other people on the fringes of society. An interesting note about this story is that it clearly shows the weight of generational and systemic oppression of Native Americans, but the individual white people with whom the protagonist interacts are all kind, compassionate people who treat him with respect. It points up the complexity of the relationships between a relatively privileged class and an oppressed class of people; it doesn’t take mustache-twirling racist villains to explore themes of oppression.

11/100 short stories read, 4/50 from the 21st century