Margaret Atwood, "Stone Mattress"

A woman runs into the guy who ruined her life and plots to murder him.

(from The New Yorker, Dec. 19, 2011)

At the outset Verna had not intended to kill anyone. What she had in mind was a vacation, pure and simple. Take a breather, do some inner accounting, shed worn skin. The Arctic suits her: there’s something inherently calming in the vast cool sweeps of ice and rock and sea and sky, undisturbed by cities and highways and trees and the other distractions that clutter up the landscape to the south.

Among the clutter she includes other people, and by other people she means men. She’s had enough of men for a while. She’s made an inner memo to renounce flirtations and any consequences that might result from them.

I really enjoyed this simple, well-told revenge story. No twists or surprises, just a person resolving to do something and doing it, but still I was hooked. Verna isn't a likable murderer — though her motive for preying on Bob are understandable — buts she's admirably cool and collected under pressure. Her calculated, secret badassedness is what made follow her from page to page. You can read this story here.

H.P. Lovecraft, "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and his Family"

Tracing the Jermyn lineage to find out why Arthur set himself on fire.

(from The Call of Cthulhu and Other Dark Tales)

Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species—if separate species we be—for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.

Well, I sorta saw the big reveal coming, but that's okay. This was a fun little story, with lots of death and antiquated charm. You can read it here. My horror kick continues.

Jim Shepard, “HMS Terror”

A stoic lieutenant keeps a journal as his 1845 oceanic arctic expedition gets frozen in place.

(from Zoetrope All-Story, Fall 2011)

He saw me as one of those solitary and open-mouthed boys who possessed the gift of lethargy in its highest perfection, though he never glimpsed the comprehensive intransigence of my isolation, and he never lost an opportunity to provide me with what he liked to call moral hints to the young on the value of time.

I smirked at the sailors who looked across the ice at the companion vessel Erebus and pondered its name. Uh, guys? You’re on the Terror. I’d assumed no ship would be christened with such a foreboding name, but Wikipedia tells me otherwise. Turns out the real Terror got around quite a bit, making appearances in the War of 1812 and an Antarctic expedition headed by James Clark Ross (of Ross Ice Shelf fame). Both ships have apparently turned up in literature before, including shout-outs in The Heart of Darkness. The expedition described in Shepard’s beautifully bleak story has its own entry, Franklin's lost expedition, and that should give you a clue as to the ordeals suffered by our poor narrator. But plot spoilers be damned; this story’s about the journey. You can read the first tiny bit of it here, but this hardly does justice to the sick sad events that follow.

Stephen King, "The Dune"

A retired judge updates his will and makes yet another pilgrimage to see the Dune of Doom.

(from Granta 117)

I haven’t read a ton of Stephen King — and I do believe there is a metric ton available — but I know a thing or two. I know It remains one of the most fucked up books of all time, not just for its violence and inventive scariness, but for all the disturbing stuff the story could have done without but which the author apparently could not. It’s just a batshit crazy story. (Wanna up the ante? Try the 45-hour audiobook version narrated by Steven Weber, of Wings fame.) I know that I read a short story of King's a few years ago and it was damn good. I know everybody says to read On Writing and I’m gonna get to that soon. I know that in addition to his poignant movies (Stand By Me, Shawkshank Redemption) and his classic horror films (The Shining, Christine), there are all those guilty pleasure flicks like Needful Things and Thinner — narrow-focused stories that usually border on quaint or ridiculous but which are also their own genre, pretty much. If “The Dune” was gonna be a movie, and it won’t be without adding a ton of subplots and cameo role for the author, it would be that last kind. It’s a fun ride with a slow reveal, a spooky device and a good ol’ twisteroo at the end.

Amie Barrodale, "William Wei"

She saw him at a party, got his number and started a confounding over-the-phone relationship.

(from The Paris Review #197)

“What do you look like, anyway? Maybe I remember seeing you.”

“I’m about forty-eight years old.”

“No,” I flipped over onto my back and put an arm over my eyes, “I can tell from your voice you’re younger.”

“I’m attached to a breathing machine.”

“Okay, fine—don’t tell me, look, I’ve got to go.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that kind of joke—I mean, everybody says stuff like that. Why can’t you just tell me what you look like?”

“Okay,” she said. She sounded shy now. She thought around and said, “I guess I’m normal looking.”

“What’s normal?”

“I’m twenty-five. I have my hair cut into bangs.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I don’t want to say any more than that.”

I miss this kind of confusion. So. I enjoyed this story. You can read the whole thing here. Pardon me. I haven't done one of these in a while. I've banned bedtime Redditing in an effort to encourage a more regular sleep pattern. Bedtime reading is encouraged, for now. But this story didn't make me sleepy.

Marlin Barton, "Into Silence"

A deaf woman gets a strange taste of freedom when a WPA photographer comes to stay with her and her mother.

(from The Best American Short Stories 2010)

The sight of a stranger in Riverfield always raised curiosity, and strangers did come through with some regularity these days, looking for work they knew they wouldn’t find or for food they hoped they’d be offered. They were lost men, lost from family and friends, and the closest they could come to home was someone else’s doorstep. This man, though, wasn’t walking alone, and to see her mother walking beside him struck her as a little odd.

I dunno. I guess I was pulled into this one just fine, but I wish it'd felt fresher and had more going on. Kinda boring, at times, but occasionally enlightening. The smart little jolt at the end, while ridiculous, was at least fun. Don't regret reading it; wouldn't recommend it.

Steve Almond, "Donkey Greedy, Donkey Gets Punched"

A psychologist takes on a professional poker player as a patient.

(from Best American Short Stories 2010)

Is there such a thing as a poker fiction? I bet there is, and that this is a stellar example of the genre. I'm not sure why I like watching poker on TV — the money? the deception? the who-will-get-lucky-on-the-river moments? — but this story hit me in the same place, with the shrink and the a-hole patient seated across the table from each other. And the end was blunt and unexpected, like the hand that wipes you out at the poker table.

I guess I'm reading short stories again. I read this one at the Hotel des Alpes in Montreal. Yesterday I finished reading Margaret Atwood's Year of the Flood. I want one of these shirts but $25?!

David Means, "The Knocking"

A man is driven mad by his noisy upstairs neighbor.

(from The Spot)

Upstairs, he stops for a moment, just to let the tension build, and then he begins again, softer at first, going east to west and then east again, heading toward the Fifth Avenue side of the building, pausing to get his bearings, to look out at the view, to taunt me, I imagine, before going back into motion for a few minutes, setting the pace with a pendulous movement, following the delineation of the apartment walls—his the same as mine, exactly the same—and then there is another pause, and I lean back and study the ceiling and hear, far off, the sound of knocking in his kitchen, until eventually, maybe five minutes, maybe more, he comes back and begins again persistent and steady, without the usual aggression, as if he had forgotten me, set me aside, put away his desire for vengeance, offering a reprieve from the nature of his knocking.

To the guy downstairs, every sound from above is a kind of knocking. Hammering a nail, sweeping a floor, these are just different breeds of knocks that pound away at his head. And for a while we sympathize with him. What could the upstairs guy be trying to accomplish, pounding away so cruelly? Then, well, we learn more about the downstairs guy. All the world loves an unreliable narrator. Good stuff.
Read it here.

Seth Fried, "Life in the Harem"

A guy wonders why the king assigned him to the harem.

(from Tin House issue 43)

One night, I was simply dragged from my bed by two of the king’s guards. I tried to imagine what crime I could have committed, but the only thing that came to mind, as the guards pulled me through the darkened corridors of the palace, our progress lit by the glow of their lamps, was a beautiful spring afternoon two months prior, which I had spent staring stupidly out a window.

So funny and strange. Stories like these, with insane kings and lavish harems — they're fun for a lot of reasons, but especially for their historical ambiguity. When/where could these events have possibly taken place? Nowhere/never, right? I mean, the issues are real, and these are recognizably human characters, but since we can't really place them in history, their plights become as simple and timeless as allegories. And, like I said, fun.
Read an excerpt from this story, here. Also: Seth Fried has a blog.

Ingo Schulze, "Cell Phone"

A man in a rented bungalow is terrorized by rowdies. Rowdies. I was never a rowdy.

(from One More Story)

Until the events of this story, the narrator had never shared his cell phone number with anybody but his wife. He hesitantly betrays this direct loveline when he shares the number with a neighbor who is also having his fence and mailbox torn up by punk kids. It's an innocent act, sharing the number, but it does threaten his connection with Constanze. I like this simple little still waters story. Learned a new word in this story: feuilleton. It's the the gossip/criticism part of the newspaper, according to Wikipedia.

Ken Kalfus, "The Joy and Melancholy Baseball Trivia Quiz"

Funny/weird/sad/pretty/implausible baseball fun facts.

(from Thirst)

If this is a story, it's a bunch of stories. Each has a little question header like "Who hold the record for most bunt singles in a season?" which is followed by a couple pages surrounding this supposedly true thing you'll never hear again. Baseball, being so old and so tangled in statistics and whimsy and drama and patriotism and family bonding and civic pride, really lends itself well to joy and melancholy. See "Home Run Kings" by Refrigerator, or this story, or almost every movie about baseball (especially if Kevin Costner's in it). My Baseball Prospectus-reading SABR-metric nerd friends would dig this story. I did too, even though hockey is way more my thing.

David Foster Wallace, "Another Pioneer"

A narrator recalls a story a friend told him he overheard one passenger tell another in the row in front of him on a plane.

(from Oblivion)

This is an amazing parable within a story, unnecessarily, so unreliably related and so devoid of facts it's kinda worthless to our narrator's presumed audience. But to the reader it's just brilliant. Layered, funny, unique in unique ways. I've been thinking about David Foster Wallace recently because summer's coming up and I've got this kind of mild Alexander the Great complex when it comes to Infinite Jest. I miss it. And I've been listening to the audiobook of David Lipsky's Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, about spending a week on the road with DFW just after Infinite Jest came out. It's tough to think of the guy in that weeklong conversation leaving like he did.
Looks like you can read "Another Pioneer" here. No paragraph breaks, so, good luck.

Big thanks for Mike My Brother, who saved this site from the curious abyss of Blogspot's befuddling new FTP policy, not that I know what that even stands for.

My Turtle Test

Karl Taro Greenfeld, "Thirst"

Water rationing turns a town upside down.

(from The Paris Review, Spring 2010)

Just a really sharp, really engrossing story. More to think about than to talk about. Here's Karl Taro Greenfeld on Twitter.

Lily Tuck, "Ice"

An older couple takes a cruise through Antarctica.

(from The American Scholar, Spring 2010)

I suppose it's a bit heavy-handed to sail these two emotionally distant old warhorses into the coldest place on earth, but Tuck is gentle about it. It was only when I put the story down that I realized Maud and Peter's journey into ever icier waters corresponds with their deteriorating moods. I liked this story, mostly because its strange mix of claustrophobia (the relationship, the tiny cabin) and expansiveness (the open water, the immense icebergs).

Dicky Murphy, "Witness Protection Bridge"

The Brooklyn Bridge fears mafia reprisals.

(from McSweeney's issue 33)

Sometimes I think some litmags should just put out a porno wherein the city of New York just makes damp, smug love with the magazine and all the writers who choose to live there. Just finally going at it, and dismissing with all artistic pretense. I'm from Philly, so I'm bound to feel this way. Anyway this story — by an L.A. writer, I should point out — concerns "the world's most famous bridge" (hah) being afraid that the mafia will like have it killed for some reason. Props to Dicky Murphy for keeping the thing under 300 words. Fits the silly premise.This is from The Panorama Book Review section of The San Francisco Panorama, McSweeney's's big, pretty newspaper edition.

Claire Keegan, "Foster"

An Irish girl goes to live with another family for a little while.

(from The New Yorker, Feb. 15, 2010)

She leads me into the house. There’s a moment of darkness in the hallway; when I hesitate, she hesitates with me. We walk through into the heat of the kitchen, where I am told to sit down, to make myself at home. Under the smell of baking, there’s some disinfectant, some bleach. She lifts a rhubarb tart out of the oven and puts it on the bench. Pale-yellow roses are as still as the jar of water they are standing in.

I'm not sure what to say about this one except it was excellent. Just a really thoughtful, smart story that keeps you hooked with each sentence. This is one of those stories that belong in scholastic anthologies; it would make a fine topic for some kind of English class. Got a classic, timeless vibe, with a couple mysterious moments I had to reread and contemplate.
Thanks for the recommendation, Uncle Bob!

Richard Bausch, "Something Is Out There"

After her husband gets shot earlier in the day, a wife in a small town starts to get the sense that things are unraveling.

(from Something Is Out There)

At first, I was the one battening down the hatches, fearing a story of lame/poignant domestic tension. I mean, there's this aunt that just won't shut up. It took a few pages for Bausch to up the ante, but he did it kinda brilliantly heaping on the tension little by little. By the end I was loving it. SPOILER ALERT: Short stories like this, ones that don't resolve their primary conflict, get a lot of shit for copping out and not delivering a payoff to the loyal reader. Sometimes, I agree with that feeling of ripped-offness. But not with this one. I like not knowing what comes next. Uncertainty is the whole point.

Roberto Bolaño, "William Burns"

A guy is charged with protecting two women in a remote house with a whole lot of windows.

Anyway, these women had two dogs, a big one and a little one. And I never knew which dog belonged to which woman.

(from The New Yorker, Feb. 8. 2010)

This a weird story. The narrator contradicts himself without blinking and the whole thing is told in a dreamlike fog, where you are told about things you can't picture, where the characters are strangely accepting of the strangeness.

Read it here.

Aimee Bender, "Americca"

A family keeps discovering extra things around the house.

(from Tin House #40)

Not sure if there was something larger or overarching but I loved what this story did on the surface. This might be a ghost story, but who ever heard of a ghost that gave gifts? And usually, the gifts are just nice, innocuous gifts, unsettling because they appear out of thin air, but not intimidating on their own. It's like, thanks for the free soup, gifty ghost!
Read the story here.

E.O. Wilson, "Trailhead"

What happens to the colony when the queen dies.

(from The New Yorker, Jan. 25, 2010)

At first, there was no overt sign that her long life was ending: no fever, no spasms, no farewells. She simply sat on the floor of the royal chamber and died. As in life, her body was prone and immobile, her legs and antennae relaxed. Her stillness alone failed to give warning to her daughters that a catastrophe had occurred for all of them.

Even though this is a story about ant, and it seems to get into ant psychology, assigning motives and such, I can't help but think this would work as a piece of creative non-fiction. My assumption is that at the heart of this spectacular little epic (one almost entirely lacking when it comes to individual characters) is pure science based on hardcore entomology. (The secret life of insects is a fascinating topic, and one I tried to put onto paper myself once.) And I'm right, the author is an actual biologist and a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. That is a double threat.
You should read this story, so here.
.

Ben Fountain, "Impasse Tempete"

An American man visits his mostly blind Haitian friend for what might well be the last time.

(from Ecotone Vol. 4, issues 1 and 2)

He’d lived in Port-au-Prince his whole life, and when I first knew him he liked to mock the Macoutes and their country ways, their bumbling attempts at urban cool. “Macoute guy, he dance like this,” Pierre would say, stomping and lurching around like a man trying to fling a crab off his foot. “But you born in Port-au-Prince, you from the city, you dance like this,” and now he’d ease into a fluid shuffle and glide that made you thankful for your eyes. But that was years ago, and now he never left his house except to see the doctor. One of his legs was always numb, and the high blood pressure often made him dizzy, and with his cataracts he felt lost on the streets.

“I can see far,” he told me, “I can see the mountains, but I can’t see your face. Your face just look all dusty to me.”

It's just an odd bit of coincidence that I happened to pick up this story to read now, when all of our minds are on Haiti. (Interesting also, that I've stumbled onto another story about somebody who can't see faces. Anyway.) The footage and the stories coming out of the small island nation following the devastating earthquake are unbelievable. Heartbreaking.
This story aims for a similar humane nerve. It's smart and swift, with many stones left unturned. Ben Fountain's signature move, I'd say, is to lead his readers to the blank places, the possibly unimportant omitted details, and allow them to make assumptions. "Impasse Tempete" is also a vivid picture of the difficult conditions that existed in Haiti long before the earthquake.
Read it here.

Aimee Bender, "Faces"

A mom suddenly discovers her son can't tell people apart. Or tell one person from a group.

(from The Paris Review 191)

On an unusual day during my childhood, my mother showed up at school and asked me questions about myself. I was twelve or so then, and generally I found my own way home: bus, walk, bike, hitchhike. I hardly recognized her car, waiting there by the flagpole with all the other mothercars until she honked and beckoned me inside.

“I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” I said at the window.

“Get in, William,” she said, pushing open the door. “How was school?”

“Why are you picking me up?”

“Get in,” she said, pushing the door open more.

I had, right then, a fast stab of fear in my stomach, like maybe she would kidnap me. Except for the fact that she had birthed me. It was confusing.

I guess what we've got here is one of those Oliver Sachs/The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat quirky cognitive situations. A funny, probably real disease. Bender handles the revealing gently, with lots of dialogue, not always plot-advancing. Which makes the whole thing funnier and more baffling. Read the first bit of it here.

Ian McEwan, "The Use of Poetry"

A guy studies Milton to impress a girl.

(from The New Yorker, Dec. 7, 2009)

Well, that's not really all it was about. This was really the story of Michael Beard's life, from the days his mom entered him in chubby baby contest to her deathbed confession to having had affairs to his university days wooing Maisie Farmer. Kind of a magic trick here: It was short and quickly paced, but because unimportant details were weighted pretty much that same as turning points in the characters' lives, it had a thorough, pondering quality. And no respect for the usual rules about chronological storytelling.
Read it here. I'm still making my way through this stack of New Yorkers.

Uwem Akpan, "Baptizing the Gun"

A priest meets a stranger in Lagos.

(from The New Yorker, Jan. 4, 2010)

Oh boy did that just happen? All that suspense, the nerve wracking, the political intrigue, the chaos, the traffic jams, the horrific images, the tight sentences — it all leads to a ridiculously simple twist. (In fact, I recall using a similarly lame turnabout in story I wrote in a high school.) But, okay, so there's a too-neat moralistic a-ha at the end. Fine. It's still worth reading.
Read it here.

Kurt Vonnegut, "The Nice Little People"

A man finds a knife that turns out to be a little spaceship containing a tiny crew.

(from Look at the Birdie)

Once, in a creative writing course back in college, the prof asked each of us to pick a story for a sort of unofficial dream anthology. A burgeoning Kurt Vonnegut completist, I chose "Thomas Edison's Shaggy Dog." Fine, said the professor, but it's not actually a well-written story. Back then I was like whatevs but now, with some time and mileage between the then me and the now, I get what he's saying. (To quote Craig Finn: "All your favorite books/ They wouldn't seem so well-written if you were just a little bit more well-read.") And it applies to this story too, and to a lot of KV's early sci-fi short pieces. The prose is so spare it borders on artless, and the surprise endings are telegraphed almost from page one. I'm still a a KV completist, so I'll keep reading — and there's plenty to enjoy within these pieces of previously unpublished Vonnegutiae — but Sirens of Titans this is not.

Ted Kosmatka, "N-Words"

After getting cloned back into existence, modern neanderthals suffer the familiar struggles of the different.

(from Seeds of Change)

They came from test tubes. They came pale as ghosts with eyes as blue-white as glacier ice. They came first out of Korea.

Kind of an awesome race-relations story. And, as per sci-fi tradition, the monster here was... man! High-concept, you might call it, but mostly driven by supple, vivid prose. (Listen to an audio version of the story here.) I haven't read anything quite like this before, but long after put the book down, I realized the idea wasn't a completely foreign one.

Those frakkin Geico Cavemen. Seems like most of my fellow humans now hate, or have always hated, those shelf-browed accidental pitchmen, who started out as mango-salsa eating metrosexuals and now seem to just be broken-spirited dudes who just want you to let them be themselves for awhile. I never saw the doomed TV show, no regrets there — it was likely the hideous result of a marketing hivemind straying from its natural habitat. Lame, I mean.

But I do actually feel bad for those guys. Everywhere they go, they are reminded of the prevailing myth that they are stupid, inferior, without equality in society. They can't even bowl without having their flat noses rubbed in the bigotry of their oppressors. ’Cause down comes that Geico-logoed pinsetter to put them in their place.
And the real twist of the knife is this: It's all a joke. These cavemen, who never asked to exist, show up just long enough to be shat on by their creator (who may or may not be a smug, colonialist gecko; at the very least, he's their overpaid golden boy peer). But what is clearly true psychic pain to them, is, inexplicably, a way to sell car insurance for some unseen but inescapable corporation. I don't mean to belittle those who, you know, actually currently exist and still struggle for equal treatment and rights, but I wonder if they don't see themselves in these downtrodden straw cavemen who were created only because mocking every other upright subset of the human experience has been taken off the table when it comes to acceptable derision.

When they came for the cavemen, we said nothing because we knew there was nobody else for them to come for.

Except aliens. And Big Foot. Possibly ghosts.

But after that, we could tell ourselves that, in polite conversation and publicly aired commercials, all sentient beings were guaranteed the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, allowed to be themselves for awhile.

Tess Gallagher, "King Death"

An old homeless guy starts hanging out in the neighborhood.

(from The Man from Kinvara)

Didn't enjoy this one. Not horrible, just limp. It was simplistic in its handling of of poverty and addiction, like an after-school special. And its sentences often ran one phrase too long; nothing worse than a story that wastes your time. I'm a reader, not an inpatient. I can do something else. I did muddle through to see if it ended in precisely the maudlin non-crescendo I expected. I was close.
To be fair, I probably wasn't going to be fair. There were a lot of things stacked up against this collection, which has been sitting on my bedroom floor since I snagged it from work a few months ago. 1) Look at that oil-painted cover. This thing looks like the boringest of all boring litmags — the kind even I wouldn't buy. 2) "Selected Stories" is almost always a hint that what lies within isn't fun. At best it'll be respected. 3) The back cover is full of blurbs written in black on charcoal. 4) That might actually be a good thing. This way I can't read whatever uninteresting thing Haruki Murikami has to say. Going in, the lone upside was the title. "King Death" coulda been so metal.

Wells Tower, "Raw Water"

An older couple moves to a nearly-deserted development around a bright red, man-made lake.

(from McSweeney's 32)

This was a different kind of story for Wells Tower, a sort of Stephen King meets Charles Bukowski deal, maybe. As strange as this is, the really really weird stuff will probably happen a hundred pages past the place "Raw Water" ends. But then we'd be looking at purer breed of genre fiction, a regular old horror story. I wouldn't have minded seeing how this whole mess ends, but I understand the author's desire to call it quits early. The conclusion is predetermined, even if it isn't written.
Tomorrow McSweeney's #33 comes out. I'm looking forward to their version of a newspaper.

Ander Monson, "Weep No More Over This Event"

A divorced man may or may not be losing his mind after he shoots an intruder in his home.

(from Tin House, Vol. 11, #1)

I found out later you can set the system, which is admittedly pretty glorious, to keep someone from leaving the house, too, though I did not read the entire instruction manual at the time and it would only seem important to me later, like most realizations I have had in my life.

The uncertainty comes not from whether the man is losing his grip on reality, but when it started. I like this narrator. He's unreliable (always a good thing) but also, for a while, totally sympathetic. And yet, there were little hints not to trust the guy. I don't wanna spoil it, but I'll say this: A+ for the gradual revelation of madness.
Read some of this story here. Learn more about Ander Monson here.

Kurt Vonnegut, "Confido"

A man invents a machine that tells you what you want to hear.

(from Look at the Birdie)

Actually, you don't always want to hear it. It can be kinda meanspirited to people you like. The name Confido is meant to invoke Fido, like a dog. But this is weirder than a pet. Spooky. As is the case with a lot of Vonnegut stories of a certain vintage, this one was funny and simple, a lark, a laugh.

Jill McCorkle, “Driving to the Moon”

Two old friends catch up after years.

(from Going Away Shoes)

Heartbreaking. The characters, the dialogue — mesmerizing. This story left me feeling drained and sad. I didn't want it to end. McCorkle discusses the story over at Largehearted Boy.

Rebecca Makkai, “The Briefcase”

A prisoner escapes his place in the chain gang only to watch another man get captured to take his place.

(from The Best American Short Stories 2009)

He thought how strange that a political prisoner, marched through town in a line, chained to the man behind and chained to the man ahead, should take comfort in the fact that this had all happened before. He thought of other chains of men on other islands of the Earth, and he thought how since there have been men there have been prisoners. He thought of mankind as a line of miserable monkeys chained at the wrist, dragging each other back into the ground.

Not sure what to say except I loved this simple, smart story. There's something wonderfully old-fashioned about this one. It's so good they put it in The Best American Non-Required Reading 2009, too. You should read it.

Jill McCorkle, “Me and Big Foot”

A woman kinda tired of being lonely but mostly tired of being pitied for being alone, invents a boyfriend.

(from Going Away Shoes)

There are no tire tracks leading in or footprints leading away. No license plate or inspection sticker. The front bumper is a two-by-four. A wet note penned on a coffee-stained napkin is under the wiper: You, cute looking owner of the little scrappy dog, please don’t tow or complain. I need you. Please. I’ll be back soon.

This one was brilliant, with a sort-of unreliable narrator but she lets you in on her scheme/craziness. Because we get all our info from her, we can't really trust that her ruse (a secret-super-stud boyfriend who's always out of town) is working, but that just makes this one more fun. Recommended. Read it here.

Kevin Killian, "Spurt"

A guy drives drunk home from a wake and ends up meeting strangers in a motel for sex.

(from Impossible Princess)

This was a real clunker. Amazing that a story with this much sex and danger and whatever was so uninteresting. Just really hamfisted. I need a break, Killian. Impossible Princess is a great name for a book, though.

Kevin Killian, "Zoo Story"

This guy really likes cats.

(from Impossible Princess)

Every night, a guy sneaks into the zoo to get turned on by the big cats. And think about the 1982 Nastassja Kinski movie Cat People. And then, to nobody's surprise, he takes things too far and pays for it.

Ha Jin, "The Bane of the Internet"

Two sisters, one in Brooklyn, the other in China, correspond via email.

(from A Good Fall)

The one back in China's recently divorced from an abusive husband. She keeps hitting her sister up for money, this time for a car. She threatens to sell her organs if she doesn't get the loan (or is it a donation). Funny, strange little story. The title really doesn't fit.

Kevin Killian, "Too Far"

An American pool salesman meets members of a one-hit-wonder band in England.

(from Impossible Princess)

A little over-thorough and obvious, but kinda funny, this could easily have been ripped from the pages of a gay Penthouse Forum. Another co-author, this time Thom Wolf.

Kevin Killian, "Young Hank Williams"

A mother takes her son to a healer to cure the strange growth on his back.

(from Impossible Princess)

Presumably the kid is the young Hank Williams. Somehow he's a month old but remembers the incident enough to narrate the tale of the healer's fake-out methods and showmanship. Told in short sentences and fragments, and humorously implausible, this is one weird story. And it's got a co-author? Derek McCormack wrote this four-pager with Killian. Not a normal scnaerio, and not a normal story, but it worked out fine.

Ha Jin, "A Good Fall"

A Chinese monk is let go from his temple in New York City.

(from A Good Fall)

There's a certain type of simplicity in the title track to Ha Jin's latest collection. It's not like an allegory. More like, maybe, young adult fiction? I'm not trying to demean the story — I really enjoyed it — it's just that the narrative is so straight-forward and explanatory. Maybe it's just the right mood for a story about a monk going through simultaneous crises of money, pride, illness and identity. Even though the guy's problems are very much in the real world, there's this oddly earnest serenity.

Steve De Jarnatt, "Rubiaux Rising"

A drug addicted, Gulf War vet/amputee is trapped in an attic during Hurricane Katrina.

(from Best American Short Stories 2009)

He sees gray light squeezing through rippage in the curling tarpaper lining the inside of this well-built roof. Wood is bare, creosoted here and there, but no paint.

Yeah, that summary is a handful, but this is actually not a heavy-handed or melodramatic story. It's kinda simple and brilliant and weird. Wait, what?! Is this the same Steve De Jarnatt who wrote Strange Brew? And the guy who wrote Strange Brew directed Cherry 2000? Turns out yes. Dude just got his MFA from Antioch. This is his first published short story. And, I believe, the only link between the Best American series and Bob and Doug McKenzie.

Alyson Hagy, "Border"

A boy steals a dog and goes hitchhiking.

(from Ghosts of Wyoming)

There's a precise (if hard to verbalize) kind of mood on every page, in every sentence. It's a feeling of arcane wildness. The dim highways and open country, the hitchhiking, the coin-flip kindness/meanness of strangers met on the road — it feels like a rusted over, pre-cell phone version of America a passing reader like myself may hope still exists. Good story, too, with swift bits of tension and horror.

"Yurt," Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum

A teacher comes back from her sabbatical in Yemen.

(Best American Short Stories 2009)

It was the first week of May, and she was holding court in the teachers’ lounge, her hair nearly down to her waist and her big belly protruding over her lap. Above the belly, Ms. Duffy laughed and swayed and gestured freely with her hands, as if to say, “What—this old thing?”

Ms. Hempel couldn’t take her eyes off it. It looked as tough as a gourd.

This is my first short story in a long while, after my own Infinite Jest-related sabbatical. Loved the book. I didn't go for this story however. It wasn't bad (obviously — the BASS stamp, if nothing else, guarantees great writing on a sentence-by-sentence basis) just a little dull. I guess you have to be in the mood to read a story about savoring moments and what have you.

Read it yourself, here.

David Eagleman, "Circle of Friends"

After you die, you stop meeting new people.

(from Sum)

Another amazing and brief imagining of the afterlife, with a killer last line I didn't see coming and won't spoil except to say it's a thinker. In fact, Sum contains 41 different ideas on what the afterlife might be like, and all are so tiny they are bound to raise more questions than they can answer in a page or two. It's all bare bones when you leave the flesh behind.

David Eagleman, "Sum"

After you die you do your life with new sorted by functions.

(from Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives)

In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.

That's the first line. From there, it becomes a list of what you relive and how long. Simple, short, brilliant, weirdly blissful. I heard this story read by Jeffrey Tambor on RadioLab recently, which is what prompted me to go out and buy the book. You can read "Sum" here. But I also recommend you check out the "After Life" episode of RadioLab and subscribe tot he podcast. It turns me on to interesting things all the time.

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, "The Fountain House"

Following a deadly bus crash, a father goes to the hospital to get his daughter out of the morgue.

(from The New Yorker, Aug. 31, 2009)

There once lived a girl who was killed, then brought back to life. That is, her parents were told that she was dead, but they weren’t allowed to keep her body.

Short and perfect. It just captures so well that vivid but not 100% lucid it-was-my-house-but-it-wasn't dream feeling. What's real, and what's a trick of the subconscious? It's deliciously vague and spooky. I don't believe I've ever used deliciously before, like that, and I don't approve. But I recommend the story, which you can read here.

Jess Wells, "The Rookery"

The junior sexed up falconer considers taking a wife.

(from Bitten)

This is a collection of Dark Erotic Stories with a nice shiny snake on the cover. But, yeah, I don't have high hopes for it. This dark erotic story concerns father and son falconer whose birds are, like, their sexual mood rings. And, it's bawdy and ridiculous. It's well-written, but.

J.C Hallman, "The Hospital for Bad Poets"

A bad poet gets treated by the bad poetry EMS.

(from The Hospital for Bad Poets)

This is the title track from Hallman's upcoming collection. It's a story, I guess. But I think it would work better as some kind of really out-there late-in-the-show SNL sketch. Which is not to say it's, like, really funny (or not funny — oh 12:45 SNL). It's just all premise, and it sticks around a few pages past its welcome.
Man, I haven't read a story in a while. I'm still embroiled in the increasingly infinite-seeming Infinite Jest.

Nick Arvin, "The Accident"

A couple seems on the verge of a break-up when they witness a car accident.

(from The Normal School, Spring 2009)

"We've not broken up," I said. "Have we? We haven't."

I was very surprised that the small bio in the back of the magazine described the author as somebody with considerable experience. This story, while certainly interesting, seemed, at times, overwritten. As I read, I noted moments that called for tweaking, tightening, obfuscating. Many of the moves were telegraphed. Which is not to say I didn't like it. I rarely finish reading something I'm not in some way engaged with. This story, with its vivid description of a dark, lonesome highway, will stick with me. I wonder if that kind of scene is as frightening for the average reader as the car crash.
There's a pic of John Linnell of They Might Be Giants, because I couldn't find the magazine cover anywhere online and this story just put "The End of the Tour" in my head.

Kenneth Calhoun. "Nightblooming"

A bunch of old jazz players hires a young drummer for their next gig.

(from The Paris Review #189)

The sun tilts though the trees and everywhere are shafts of dust. We're just a speck in the grand whirling scheme, but at least we're making noise.

I spend at least some of my time at work reading and editing music criticism. I like it, It's a dance about architecture, yes, and the dance is difficult. This Calhoun guy, in his description of the band's gig, nails it, makes you hear it in your head, or picture it. And he write about his characters with the same technical beauty. Like some jazz, this story zigs a little when you might expect a zag, but it's not pretentious. Really, comparing anything to jazz it lame, but I'm not going to delete that cause you get me.
Read this story here.

Jill McCorkle, "PS"

The final letter from the divorced woman to the marriage councilor.

(from The Atlantic Fiction 2009)

But I did like how you always had the daily paper and People magazine in your bathroom, except sometimes when I started reading, I forgot that I had to go back in there and hear what a difficult person I am. Remember that time you had to come and get me and I told you I was feeling sick? What I was actually doing was reading about David Koresh and thinking how Jerry’s new religion was getting on my nerves, but at least he wasn’t that bad. Not yet anyway. Of course, I wanted to know what to be looking for in case the turn he’d already taken got worse.

Liked this one. A straightforward premise made a little jagged here and there by each revelation. I mean, yeah, it's a tiny bit schticky but that's cool cause it's funny, too. It doesn't really feel "literary" (or whatever you want to call it when the narrator starts working the metaphors) until the final page which really works for an exercise like this.
Read it here. Read an interview with Jill McCorkle here.

Garth Nix, "Punctuality"

The Emperor takes his clone-daughter Ilugia to see the Punctuality Drive.

(from The New Space Opera 2)

Look, I like nerds. (I've been called one, though I believe myself better filed under "dork.") But the nerdery in this story is just lame. The Star Sapphire Throne? The Sixth-first Empress of All Known Space? It's all so ’70s and... uncool. My god. I've crossed over.

Téa Obreht, "The Laugh"

Oh crap, hyenas.

(from The Atlantic Fiction 2009)

I was torn. On one hand, the tension was brilliant, like a decent slasher flick. The dark, the quiet, insanely open outdoors, the cramped empty house, the unseen killer, the flashlight darting around. I genuinely thought this story would have some non-flashbacking action. And it kinda does, a little. I don't wanna give things away. Anyway, here's the other hand: It's clumsy, it's awkward, it expects you to believe somebody forgot his gun wasn't loaded, maybe even expects you to forget it. Which, no way. But, hell, it's a good monster story.
That's a pic of wildebeests I screencapped from the Africam.

J.G. Ballard, "Manhole 69"

Three guys are given an experimental surgery that eliminates their need to sleep.

(from The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard)

And then the people go crazy and everybody's stiff and plain and there's no mistaking this for a modern story. Just so silly and stiff. It needs some fun, some more personality, though it is certainly interesting. Know what else it needs? A new title. I read this on the Peter Pan to New York to see Superchunk and I wondered if anybody caught a glance of the title at the top of the right-hand pages. Way over the top. Nobody would name a story "Manhole 69" these days unless it was, you know, supposed to be dirty. Ridiculous.
So, there's a pic I took of Superchunk. There was no architect designed this view.

Craig Hartglass, "Pigs"

Over the years, a customer's obsession with an aloof bank teller simmers.

(from One Story #120)

He remembered the very beginning, when she started at the bank, how her black hair filled the booth with a fiery charm that managed to cut through the meanness of her personality, her flagrant disregard and dismissal of him, and his own wondering: was it his lack of height or the gap between his teeth or the bump in his nose or his messy work clothes and boots or something altogether different?

It took me a few pages to realize just how much this story had on its mind. It's weird to think of a storyline only advancing during/focusing on one man's visits to the bank. Because that's, what, 30 minutes a week? Over years? It's a good excuse to see the teller's incremental changes, like she's under a strobe light. But, surely something was going on in the life of our "protagonist." Or maybe not so much. This story left me thinking.
Read an interview with Craig Hartglass here.

John Burnside, "The Bell Ringer"

A woman in an unhappy marriage takes a bell ringing class.

(from the O. Henry Prize Stories 2009)

And she develops a crush a young man in her class. Also her husband's sister confides that she's having an affair. This was a mostly plain and unexciting story, well written but full of small action. Except for the end which is a fun surprise. Fine, fine, fine. But it's summer. Give me some of that good time reading.