I’m a short story reader, reviewer, and writer. Short stories are a powerful form, combining the distilled intensity of poetry with the depth of character development. They allow enough space to get to know a character, feel the pain of their disappointments, to root for their ultimate success. Such moments reflect broader realities of a culture, a society, a people. A single-author collection gives great insight into a writer’s abilities and style. My own debut collection was a finalist for the Alistair MacLeod short fiction prize and is critically acclaimed, so hopefully, that means my careful reading of these collections has taught me a thing or two.
The scenarios in Friday Black, at first, felt unbelievable, even though they were an amplification of rampant capitalism and racism that are already very real. I didn't want them to be real. Adjei-Brenyah rendered them so perfectly and developed his narrators' psychology so effectively (especially his retail workers, so reminiscent of a commercial world I used to inhabit) that I became immersed in these new realities.
The characters are underdogs by virtue of simply being Black people in America. But they are resilient and complex, finding unique ways to resist.
The writing is beautiful, with tightly turned phrases aptly describing the time and place.
The instant New York Times bestseller 'An unbelievable debut' New York Times
Racism, but "managed" through virtual reality
Black Friday, except you die in a bargain-crazed throng
Happiness, but pharmacological
Love, despite everything
A Publisher's Weekly Most Anticipated Book for Fall 2018
Friday Black tackles urgent instances of racism and cultural unrest, and explores the many ways we fight for humanity in an unforgiving world. In the first, unforgettable story of this collection, The Finkelstein Five, Adjei-Brenyah gives us an unstinting reckoning of the brutal prejudice of the US justice system. In Zimmer Land we see a far-too-easy-to-believe imagining of…
Christie’s stories are set in downtown eastside Vancouver, a neighbourhood notorious for junkies and homelessness. Of course, the realities are much more diverse.
These stories focus not only on the down-and-out but also on shop owners and others trying to make a go there, the traumatic things they witness and experience, and the guilt of surviving there. In prose that is sharp and witty, yet evocative and illuminating, he shows every character to be struggling, regardless of their situation.
It is a very real look at completely believable characters. And he sees them very clearly, shows their humanity, and finds compassion for all of them.
Critically lauded, The Beggar’s Garden is a brilliantly surefooted, strikingly original collection of nine linked short stories that will delight as well as disturb. The stories follow a diverse group of curiously interrelated characters, from bank manager to crackhead to retired Samaritan to web designer to car thief, as they drift through each other’s lives in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. These engrossing stories, free of moral judgment, are about people who are searching in the jagged margins of life―for homes, drugs, love, forgiveness―and collectively they offer a generous and vivid portrait of humanity, not…
Kerry Lee Powell writes some of the best sentences I’ve ever read. A lot of her opening lines (“Today's the day Mitchell Burnhope gets the royal shit kicked out of him” ... “I took my kung fu instructor off speed-dial today” ... “A dozen of us were dressed up as low-budget ghosts outside Earl’s Court tube station”) are arresting, instantly grabbing my attention, while hinting at something more, posing a question and inviting me to read on.
What was happening was usually much deeper than first expected. She's economic with her words, but in a few pages I came to care about the characters and I miss them now, feel like they're still out there somewhere wheeling and dealing to keep their head above water.
Ranging from an island holiday gone wrong to a dive bar on the upswing to a yuppie mother in a pricey subdivision seeing her worst fears come true, these acclaimed, deftly written stories are populated by barkeeps, good men down on their luck, rebellious teens, lonely immigrants, dreamers and realists, fools and quiet heroes. In Kerry Lee Powell’s skillful hands, each character, no matter what his or her choices, is deeply human in their search for connection. Powell holds us in her grasp, exploring with a black humour themes of belonging, the simmering potential for violence, and the meaning of…
The long titular story from Peninsula Sinking is about three phases in a young man’s life, and his maturation from a guy who does crazy stunts to get attention from the cool kids to someone who, full of regrets and hopes, grapples with highly evolved intellectual and ethical conundrums and finds safety only in love.Its final third opens with this enticement: “Imagine it’s you facing the loss of the still-ripening cherries between your legs.” Throughout the book, Huebert proves himself a wizard with figurative, sensual writing, layering bizarre images with tricky turns of phrase. We are reminded that “there were palm trees on Antarctica once.” Anything can happen.
This collection is filled with great energy, stunning images, and overall great stories—all of them prominently featuring non-human animals, and their interactions with humans, in some cases tackling complex ethical dilemmas with considerable insight.
In his debut collection of short stories, David Huebert brings us an assortment of wounded wanderers who remind us that we are all marooned on the shores of being, watching oceans rise. Veterinarians, prison guards, and prosthetic phallus designers develop various schemes to navigate the ruins of their capsizing lives and to confront the beauty of their bruised worlds.
Egan's point-of-view and temporal experiments worked very well. Even the Powerpoint presentation-as-story/chapter. I loved getting different perspectives on the same characters at various times in their lives, and thus became emotionally attached and curious about what happened to them.
Some consider this a novel, but I enjoyed each “chapter” as a self-contained short story. Several pieces focused on aging punker Bennie Salazar and/or his employee, Sasha. In the non-Bennie chapters I wondered about Bennie, and Sasha. Despite the time leaping, the plot had a nice circular arc in the end that was quite satisfying, tying the whole thing together.
The reason this work ultimately resonates with me is that these stories offer profound insights about modern humans: the universal power of our music, the influence of hype and technology, the nature of time, frailty and desire, pollution and energy, aging, and the long-term consequences of our choices.
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOKS OF 2010
Jennifer Egan's spellbinding novel circles the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other's pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.
We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist's couch in…
Shortlisted for the prestigious Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction, the jury had this to say: "In Boy with a Problem, Chris Benjamin parses some of the major political issues of our times through the flawed, driven, often lonely characters he inhabits. They discover that nothing is ever as ethically easy as it appears. In many of these dozen stories of messy morality and questionable action, characters unravel their own motivations, learn the impossibility of escaping the past and face the very human costs of justice. They become intimate with the light that death sheds on life in their efforts to live it at all, if not well."
These 13 short stories by award-winning author Chris Benjamin are about love, loss, failure, and acceptance.
I once saw a play at the renowned Oregon Shakespeare Theatre. A play about Sor Juana. It was a good play, but it felt like something was missing like jalapenos left out of enchiladas. The play kept nudging me to look further to find Sor Juana, and so for the next five years, I did so. I read and read more. I listened for her voice, and that is where I heard her life come alive. This isn’t the only possibility for Sor Juana’s life; it is just the one I heard.
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, this brilliant 17th century nun flew through Mexico City on the breeze of poetry and philosophy. She met with princes of the Church, and with the royalty of Spain and Mexico. Then she met a stunning, powerful woman with lavender eyes, la Vicereine Maria Louisa, and her life changed forever. As her fame grew, she dared to challenge the diabolical Archbishop once too often, and he threw her in front of the Inquisition, where she stood, alone.
Sor Juana's work is studied still today, and justifiably so. Scholars study her months on end; mystics…
This astonishingly brilliant 17th century poet and dramatist, this nun, flew through Mexico City on wings of inspiration. Having no dowry, she chose the life of a nun so that she might learn, so that she might write, so that she might meet the most fascinating people of the western world. She accomplished all of that, and more.
One day a woman with violet eyes, eyes the color of passion flowers, entered her life. It was the new Vicereine, Maria Luisa. As the two most powerful women in Mexico City, the bond between them crossed politics and wound them in…
