Short Stories

Paul Vidich discusses his new iPhone, iPad, and iTouch app with me as well as how short stories are marketed, how The New Yorker curates fiction, and how people will be reading in the years to come on The Daily BR!NK.

Sneak peek of Slice Magazine's 8th Issue

Dear loyal readers,

I’m pleased to announce that my short story “Dorian in Germany” has been selected for Slice Magazine’s 8th Issue: Lies & Make-Believe to be published this April.

“Dorian in Germany” concerns the life of Dorian Shelley, a young woman living in the 1940s who endures a broken engagement that shames her family. Her depressive temperament and melancholy disposition are closely observed by her much younger brother, Brandon, who struggles to understand his sister’s loss. When Dorian’s family abruptly disowns her for reasons unbeknown to Brandon, he develops a fascination with the country to which she has fled: Germany.

The cover of Issue 8 is designed by prominent illustrator, Sophie Blackall, known for her illustrations in Big Red Lollipop, Pecan Pie Baby, and many others.  The spring/summer issue will also feature interviews with Ray Bradbury, Joshua Ferris, and Lev Grossman.

Issue 8: Lies & Make-Believe is available to pre-order here.

More details to come as I learn of them.

Love, Koa

What He’s Poised To Do by Ben Greenman, author of Please Step Back, Correspondences, and Superbad, is a collection of original romantic tales that analyze the tenuous nature of heterosexual love.

Exploring failed marriages, infidelities, trysts, and one-time encounters, these 14 stories capture the intimate moments between lovers in contemporary Boston, 1940s Havana, seventeenth-century North Africa, and Atlanta in 2015, among other scenarios. Within each is the theme of letter-writing, a carefully used device that sometimes manifests in an epistolary form or a well-served detail between characters.

In one story, a man unhappy with his marriage and family has an affair with a woman he meets in a hotel bar. The two communicate via postcards that they leave on the bed after sexual encounters. In another, a character falls in love with a woman at first glance and writes her more than 2,000 letters, none of which he actually sends to her. An unnamed male narrator in a different story receives letters from his fiancée’s mother about current events in London; all the while, he harbors a deep infatuation with her.

The stories are delicately composed with a fluid narration that deftly slips from first person to second person, and sometimes back again. All these complex characters cross the page with a very unique and individualistic longing that seems as intrinsic to them as the story Greenman imparts. Infused with tasteful ambiguity, the stories of What He’s Poised To Do don’t conclude as much as they wane exquisitely.

This sophisticated collection offers a varied depiction of romantic relationships, with many sentiments and voices that are uniform only in their excellence.  Greenman’s writing conveys a specific elegance that echoes classic literary influences while also flirting with the experimental. Nuanced, slightly mysterious, and romantic, the stories of What He’s Poised To Do present the amorous with mature restraint.

To read more about Ben Greenman, click here.

This is Not Chick Lit: Original Stories by America’s Best Women Writers, an anthology of short stories, opens with a resounding introduction by the book’s editor Elizabeth Merrick. Recalling the birth of the chick lit genre with the triumph of Bidget Jones’ Diary in 1996, Merrick recounts the commercial success that is the woman swinging the designer handbag down a busy metropolis street:

“Chick lit is the daughter of the romance novel and the stepsister of the fashion magazine. Details about race and class are almost always absent except, of course, for the protagonist’s relentless pursuit of Money, a Makeover, and Mr. Right.”

Merrick goes on to recall her own flirtation with chick lit in the mid-90s, pleased with the success of women writers. However, when the genre soon exploded to the point of eclipsing literary fiction, Merrick began to question the commercial aspect:

“The problem is, rather, that the chick lit deluge has helped to obscure the literary fiction being written by some of our country’s most gifted women — many of whom you’ve never even heard of. […] For every stock protagonist with an Hermès Birkin bag and a bead on an investment banker, there is a woman writer pushing the envelope of serious fiction with depth and humor. […] Where chick lit reduces the complexity of the human experience, literature increases our awareness of other perspectives and paths. […] Chick lit as a genre presents one very narrow representation of women’s lives, a vision that is ‘the literary equivalent of a tract-house development,’ as novelist Whitney Otto recently wrote in The New York Times.”

This Is Not Chick Lit is true to Merrick’s promise of multifariousness, providing a range of subject matter, distinctive voices, and literary styles by women writers. Unfortunately, this variation is also applicable to the quality of the stories, some more memorable than others. Aimee Bender’s “Two Days” and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Thing Around your Neck” are among the strongest, delivering compelling narration and reflective prose.

In “Two Days,” a nameless female narrator ponders her connection with a male suitor, examining the cultural fixation on “the one.” Her infatuation with her date eventually transitions into noticing minute details about their days together, ending in a wonderful literary ambiguity. In “The Thing Around Your Neck,” the Nigerian protagonist misses her family and culture after she moves to New England. When she begins dating a wealthy white student, her feelings about home and identity become even more complex.

Many of the other stories in the collection are somewhat lackluster in voice and, placed along side Bender and Adichie, mediocre. Although a bit disappointing given Merrick’s resonating forward, these short stories do provide a peek into some different styles of fiction writing and can perhaps serve as a jumping-off point from which to explore other writers. Alone, though, This Is Not Chick Lit is a lukewarm anthology with its heart in the right place.

To read more about Elizabeth Merrick, click here.

In this assemblage of short stories, Lydia Davis demonstrates her expertise as a physicist of language. Her words methodically chosen, her sentences not written but constructed, she composes her stories in the briefest of language; indeed, sometimes they are only a few lines long. They read as meticulous and aware, with a masterfully curated tension that she allows to brim before containing it again. The result is an eerie but stirring sense of portent.

Davis explores the standard terrain of unrequited love, loneliness, and despair, but in concentrating on the disjointed elements of these experiences, she imbues her stories with a uniqueness that transcends the familiarity of their themes. She approaches romantic relationships with an airy regret and sexuality with a curious imagination, meanwhile capturing already-peculiar characters at their oddest. Often veering off into the calm supernatural, these stories could be described as modern fables.

To read more about Lydia Davis, click here.