American Short Fiction blog

Editor Stacey Swann recommends Alexi Zentner’s “Touch” for Short Story Month.

It’s pretty easy for a novel to make me cry. Novels give me the space to befriend characters, to worry over them for days or weeks. And then if something bad happens to my friend, I cry.

But it’s a lot harder to weep for someone you just met twenty minutes ago. And so if a short story makes me cry, then the writer has done something very special. To elicit such emotion so quickly requires prodigious skills in character development, tone, and language. That’s why I’ve chosen Alexi Zentner’s “Touch” as my contemporary pick for Short Story Month. The first time I read it, the story made me cry twice! (And it still makes me tear up, even after multiple rereadings.)

This story takes place in a harsh Canadian landscape, focusing on one family in a community of loggers. Zentner creates a vivid and concrete world:

Despite his bad hand, my father could still man one end of a long saw. He kept his end humming through the wood as quickly as most men with two hands. But a logger with a useless hand could not pole on the river; when the men floated the trees my father watched from the middle of the jam, where the trees were smashed safely together, staying away from the bobbing, breaking destruction of wood and weight at the edges.

“Touch” first appeared in Tin House and was selected as a jury favorite in the O. Henry Prize Stories 2008. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the O. Henry juror who selected “Touch,” describes the power of this story best:

I was moved by the elegiac telling, the unapologetic tenderness that never became maudlin, and the characters–the men hacking out a livelihood with a sort of disinterested dignity, the romantic but tough father, the mother who is determined not to lose any more, the daughter who looks wide-eyed at life, the narrator for whom my heart broke at the end. I will remember this story for a long time.

Editor Stacey Swann describes the impact of Angela Carter’s powerful “Fall River Axe Murders,” originally published nearly 30 years ago.

It’s strange for me to think of Angela Carter as a “classic” short story writer, but “The Fall River Axe Murders” was published in her collection Black Venus in 1985, well over twenty years ago. (It appeared under a different title in London Review of Books in 1981.) A melding of history and fiction, this story gives us an inside look at the infamous alleged axe murderer Lizzie Borden.

For much of my twenties, I thought of myself as a reader and not a writer. But I am fairly certain it was Angela Carter who triggered my love of fiction on the sentence level. And it wasn’t long before that love of sentences made me want to write sentences of my own.

In “The Fall River Axe Murders,” Carter first tackles the awful heat of the morning that Mr. Borden and his wife were murdered. Then she gives us our first glimpse of Lizzie:

On this morning, when, after breakfast and the performance of a few household duties, Lizzie Borden will murder her parents, she will, on rising, don a simple cotton frock—but, under that, went a long, starched cotton petticoat; another short, starched cotton petticoat; long drawers; woollen stockings; a chemise; and a whalebone corset that took her viscera in a stern hand and squeezed them very tightly.

Carter’s style tends towards excessive, and she always uses that excessiveness to its best possible advantage. This story is oppressive, from beginning to end. And I think it is brilliant, beginning to end. Carter taught me that narrative voices can have a life of their own. That readers can be complicit in the action of the story. That violence and humor can hang together. Like here:

The other old man is some kind of kin of Borden’s. He doesn’t belong here; he is visiting, passing through, he is a chance bystander, he is irrelevant.

Write him out of the script.

Even though his presence in the doomed house is historically unimpeachable, the colouring of this domestic apocalypse must be crude and the design profoundly simplified for the maximum emblematic effect.

Write John Vinnicum Morse out of the script.

And later:

The girls stayed at home in their rooms, napping on their beds or repairing ripped hems or sewing loose buttons more securely or writing letters or contemplating acts of charity among the deserving poor or staring vacantly into space.

I can’t image what else they might do.

What the girls do when they are on their own is unimaginable to me.

This story also shows how all short story rules can be broken and subverted. It is all backstory and description, with the present action taking place entirely in the few seconds before the household wakes up on the day of the murders. And yet it is utterly riveting, full of tension and threat and movement.

Editorial assistant Aaron Hierholzer selects Judy Troy’s “The Order of Things” for Short Story Month.

Judy Troy’s “The Order of Things,” which first appeared in Cornell’s Epoch and is a 2009 O. Henry Prize story, condenses a love story, a midlife crisis, and a life-altering questioning of religious faith into about eight pages of tight, unflappable prose. Reverend Carl, the protagonist, pastors a Lutheran church and is not unhappily married. But he hasn’t been able to stop thinking of Lily, a woman who attends his church, since he moved to town with his wife and daughter a year ago. Carl feels he and Lily have known each other for years even though they just met, and they fall into a clumsy affair that grows into a stable but furtive relationship. They begin to plan for the future—until tragedy strikes, and Reverend Carl is put in one of those situations that can only be described as a cruel joke.

The characterization is sparse, the themes well worn, and the ending, in which Carl comes to a revelation via an uplifting St. Theresa quote, would be incredibly trite in hands less skillful than Troy’s. Her narrative sketches Carl and Lily’s love with tenderness, despite their adultery, which runs against how we expect a cheating pastor and his mistress to be treated. Their love is conveyed without elaboration and without cliché; we’re made to see the nature of the bond through omissions as important as the striking details. Up until they’ve had their first motel meet-up, we’re not sure how Carl and Lily feel about the whole thing: is it solely a sexual attraction? Are they just bored? Troy answers those questions simply: Carl drives half a mile behind Lily as they leave the motel in the rain, watching her taillights and hoping that just by watching, he can keep her safe.

“The Order of Things,” enigmatically simple and completely sincere, manages to say something new about love, even in the confined space of a very short story.

Editorial assistant Aaron Hierholzer discusses Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” for Short Story Month.

It wasn’t until high school that I was really awed by a short story. My English teacher—who also happened to be my aunt—handed out Xeroxed copies of the Flannery O’Connor story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” The high school I was attending at this time was small, private, and acutely aware of objectionable content in its curriculum. But that morning, they missed their mark. As we all silently paged through our freshly printed packets, I experienced a story that still disturbs me upon rereading today.

I loved every word of it, but I didn’t read much more of O’Connor’s work for a long time. (I instead got hung up on another Southern gothic writer, Carson McCullers—before The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter got whapped with an Oprah sticker.) But “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” had burrowed somewhere in my gray matter, compelling me recently to pick up a copy of O’Connor’s collected stories. Inside, I found the feeling that I had felt in high school still intact, and that I’m sure has shaped how I read short fiction.

The best word to describe the feeling is dread. Her best work has a deceptive calmness; nothing particularly odd may be happening (family trip, everybody griping), but there’s the feeling that something very, very bad’s going to happen. That feeling of impending doom, created so perfectly by her sturdy, simple sentences and placid tone, tends to be exhilarating in its own upsetting way. What’s menacing about a cat stowed away in a basket in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” or about the three young boys camping outside a woman’s farmhouse in “A Circle in the Fire”? Nothing, really. What reason do we have to expect that the drifter treated so kindly by a woman and her disabled daughter in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” would do them harm? None in particular. Yet O’Connor’s skill in mood setting clues us in—something isn’t right here. And, most of the time, O’Connor delivers on her foreboding promises, quite often by letting happen what you never thought she would let happen.

Sheltered as we were from four-letter words and sexual acts of even the tamest kind at my high school, I’m glad my fellow students and I experienced O’Connor’s upsetting story that morning. I think my aunt understood that wanton violence, if contained in the framework of a story that illuminates the beauty and terror just under the surface of everyday experience, would disturb, even haunt, but not corrupt even the most impressionable of her students.

Editorial assistant Johannes Lichtman discusses Patrick Somerville’s “The Universe in Miniature in Miniature” for Short Story Month.

What makes short fiction worthy of a month? Humor and entertainment, definitely; beauty and pain; failure and redemption; shortness; but perhaps most of all, understanding. My favorite thing about reading great short stories is gaining a glimpse into the psyche of another person.

In Patrick’s Somerville’s hilariously inventive and compassionate story “The Universe in Miniature in Miniature” (ASF Summer 2009), we “observe the wholesale collapse of a family following major trauma.” Or, more accurately put, we observe three surrealist art students observing the collapse. Of the three students, Rose constructs miniature models of fathers and sons constructing miniature models of the solar system, Dylan is writing a novel, and Lucy is trying to create “The Machine of Understanding Other People,” through secret camera surveillance of a family coping with tragedy.

The question at the heart of the narrative is whether or not one can truly understand another person merely through observation and artistic interpretation. As Rose asks Lucy from outside the stricken family’s house, “Aren’t we taking by watching?”

One of the joys of this story is how deftly and humorously Somerville navigates absurdity without sacrificing respect for his characters. Somerville feels for his people—flawed and lost as they may be—and this compassion and desire to understand is one of the magnificent gifts fiction can offer. Even if, as this story suggests, artistic endeavors are completely subservient to human contact in gaining insight into the life of another, through the attempt to understand other people we can at least begin to better understand ourselves.

I’d say that calls for a month.

ASF web editor Dina Guidubaldi selects a story from debut author Wells Tower for Short Story Month.

“Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned”—first published in Fence in 2002 and the title story of Tower’s debut collection published this year by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux—is probably the most beautiful story about marauding Vikings ever. While pirates and Vikings and vampires are all well and good these days, they don’t do anything but sit there on the page and kill things unless you, the reader, can understand them. And in Tower’s story, you can.

In one scene, after the narrator’s friend has been daggered in the stomach during a badly planned raid, the characters have a lengthy debate about whether or not he’s got “the porridge illness”; in another scene, the narrator, after finally settling down, realizes “how terrible love can be. You wish you hated those people, your wife and children, because you know the things the world will do to them, because you have done some of those things yourself.” While Tower’s story won’t exactly make you want to be a Viking when you grow up, it’ll make you wish you knew one or two, just a couple pillaging friends to help stave off the dragons and the doubt.

For another perspective on this story, check out Chris Roth’s animated adaptation available on YouTube.

ASF web editor Dina Guidubaldi comments on one of her favorite stories for Short Story Month.

Though picking Flannery O’Connor is an obvious choice, and picking “Good Country People” (from her 1955 A Good Man Is Hard to Find) perhaps equally obvious, this is still one of the best stories ever. Not only does it have despicable characters who might almost be decent if they’d just quit hiding all their interesting, honest qualities, it also single-handedly attacks both religion and atheism, and further, it has one of the grossest and best make-out scenes of all time:

The boy dropped down by her side and put one arm under her and the other over her and began methodically kissing her face, making little noises like a fish. . . His breath was clear and sweet like a child’s and the kisses were sticky like a child’s.

And while you wouldn’t necessarily want to be the recipient of such kisses, the Bible salesman’s “blue figure struggling successfully over the green speckled lake” at the story’s end is pretty impressive, even attractive. You can see how someone might be tempted to follow him—anything to get away from that depressing kitchen, where Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman, those horrible, deluded monsters, talk smack about everything they don’t understand.

[For an excellent, energetic overview of O'Connor's oeuvre and Brad Gooch's new biography of the writer, see Joseph O'Neill's "Touched by Evil" in the Atlantic.—Jill]

ASF web editor Stacy Muszynski offers up one of her favorite new collections for Short Story Month.

Until Amelia Gray’s AM/PM (excerpted in ASF’s Spring 2009 issue), I waited on new works by Lydia Davis for my short-short fix.

It’s Gray’s characters. Neighbors perhaps to Sandra Cisneros’s wiser-than-their-years children in House on Mango Street and Kim Chinquee’s neurotic cast of characters in Oh Baby, Gray’s people live in houses and apartments all their own.

Charming, fragile, funny, febrile, sometimes hopeful and always yearning, Gray’s couples stun, often in 100 words. Take a look at Carla and Andrew for example:

Carla switched off the hair dryer. “It’s easy to forget how much around us is flammable,” she said.
Andrew didn’t look up from his dress shirt. “I believe I have a stain,” he said.
“We could all go up at any moment.”
“The human body is ninety-five percent water.”
“That’s just the blood,” she said, pulling her hair up into a rhinestone-studded clip.
“You’re being morbid.”
“I’m telling the truth. Bone is only twenty-two percent. Give that a couple days to dry out and you’ve got yourself a nice little blaze.”
He looked at her. “Listen,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Each of AM/PM’s 119 vignettes is as poignant as a poem, as sassy as your friend’s cat–and as surprising.

Congrats

ASF would like to congratulate Amelia for her recent win of 2008 Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize hosted by FC2.

Prize finalists were chosen from among nearly 300 submissions by FC2′s board of directors, based on FC2′s stated mission to publish “fiction considered by America’s largest publishers too challenging, innovative, or heterodox for the commercial milieu.”

Of the selection of Amelia’s collection of short stories, Museum of the Weird, final judge Lidia Yuknavitch has this to say: “A complex and piercing collection, as poetic as it is poignant, Museum of the Weird features twenty-four short stories that collectively expose both the hilarity and heartbreak of life in the twenty-first century.” The collection is scheduled for a spring 2010 release.

ASF web editor Stacy Muszynski offers up one of her favorite stories for Short Story Month.

Its language isn’t lyrical, literary, or tricky, its structure nothing new under the sun. Its characters aren’t exotic. They’re not even surprising—except that they tell the truth. And these are exactly the reasons Irwin Shaw’s “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” is absolutely fresh—and excruciating—70 years later.

Take young Manhattan marrieds Frances and Michael out for a sunny Sunday morning stroll, slip in female passersby, insert dialogue so simple, direct, and dead-on to real life that you have what’s sure to be a real pedestrian wreck on Eighth Avenue. An early clue: “‘Look out,’ Frances said, as they crossed Eighth Street. ‘You’ll break your neck.’”

What Frances is talking about, of course, is Michael’s habit of craning his neck to check out other women. So when we get Frances’s beautiful and unwitting self-comparison to “a rope” wound around Michael in the night and her constant pressure for the truth of his attraction to other women (which she doesn’t really want to hear), and Michael’s gentle, honest allowance, “Sometimes I feel I would like to be free”—and more, a few brutal killing-words more—we get two people who are not only providing their rope but hanging themselves, too.

Witnessing them squirm sure doesn’t give a reader much hope. Especially when we’re right there with them trying to cross between cars.

“Girls in Their Summer Dresses” was originally published in the New Yorker (February 4, 1939), and again in Sailor off the Breman by Random House that same year.

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The always amazing Dan Wickett has reminded us (via  Emerging Writers Network) that May is Short Story Month. To celebrate, he and others are reading and blogging about short stories every day. American Short Fiction will be joining the fray throughout the month as we bring you our staff picks for our favorite contemporary and classic short stories. For now, you can check out these sites to get your short story fix:

Emerging Writers Network

Matt Bell

Hobart’s blog

Storyglossia’s blog