I have written two short story collections and am working on a third. I have been passionate about short stories for as long as I have been a reader, and continue to find the form extraordinary. Alice Munro famously defined a short story as a house you can step inside rather than a journey you undertake. I feel that a short story is a respectful invitation to the reader to visit briefly and enjoy a small interlude on the way to wherever they are going.
Rose grows up in a working-class family in a town in Southern Ontario between the wars. She is good in school, makes it to university, marries the son of a department store owner, moves to Vancouver, divorces, becomes an actor, teaches acting, grows older, and returns to the town to take care of her stepmother.
These connected stories give us a picture of Roseās life, but each is a masterpiece by itself. The Beggar Maid, about her marriage, has the most devastating yet subtle ending I have ever read: a precise flick with a small, very sharp knife. I read this first when I was fourteen and too young to comprehend it. Now, I reread it every few years and probably will for the rest of my life.
**A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS BIG JUBILEE READ PICK**
Previously published as 'The Beggar Maid', Alice Munro's wonderful collection of stories reads like a novel, following Rose's life as she moves away from her impoverished roots and forges her own path in the world.
Born into the back streets of a small Canadian town, Rose battled incessantly with her practical and shrewd stepmother, Flo, who cowed her with tales of her own past and warnings of the dangerous world outside. But Rose was ambitious - she won a scholarship and left for Torontoā¦
This book is an outlier in the sense that most of the stories dwell in the fantastic. Women shed their skins. A girl becomes hypnotized by a circle of light. An apparently ordinary vintage shop in Torontoās Kensington Market has something unnerving in the back room.
But I love this book so much that I take every opportunity to recommend it. Itās still (in a heightened mode) expressing the deep strangeness of domestic lifeāwhat happens in the spaces we live in, what tensions or tragedies or irreconcilable conflicts result from small clashes between closely related peopleāin a way that seems to me like one of the things that fiction is for. This book is a hidden gem, like finding a secret compartment in an old desk.
Surreal, ambitious and exquisitely conceived, The Doll's Alphabet is a collection of stories in the tradition of Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. Dolls, sewing machines, tinned foods, mirrors, malfunctioning bodies - many images recur in stories that are in turn child-like and naive, grotesque and very dark. In 'Unstitching', a feminist revolution takes place. In 'Waxy', a factory worker fights to keep hold of her Man in a society where it is frowned upon to be Manless. In 'Agata's Machine', two schoolgirls conjure a Pierrot and an angel in a dank attic room. In 'Notes from a Spider', a half-man,ā¦
Zoe Lorel, an elite operative in an international spy agency, is sent to abduct a nine-year-old girl. The girl is the only one who knows the riddle that holds the code to unleash the most lethal weapon on earthāthe first ever āinvisibilityā nano weapon, a cloaking spider bot. But whenā¦
A lower-middle-class girl grows up in provincial England, and we follow her from early childhood through middle age. Thatās it. She has a few relationships, a few kids, and some friendships. She fights with her mother, she works, and she thinks about her life, but only in passing because sheās busy living.
The kind of book thatās not supposed to work, except it does. It was technically marketed as a novel but exists on the disputed border between connected short story collections and novels. Each section can be read by itself and is a world unto itself. This book is full of moments that express how strange it is to have consciousness, how we are caught, suddenly, in the midst of ourselves, unable to believe we are here.
An indelible story of one womanās life, revealed in a series of beautifully sculpted episodes that illuminate an era, moving from the 1960s to today, from one of Britainās leading literary lightsāTessa Hadley.
āClever Girl isā¦what could be called a āsensibilityā novelāa story that doesnāt overreach, about a character who feels real, told in prose that isnāt ornate yet is startlingly exact. The effect is a fine and well-chosen pileup of experiences that gather meaning and power.āāMeg Wolitzer, New York Times Book Review
Clever Girl is a powerful exploration of family relationships and class in modern life, witnessed through theā¦
This is Liās first collection, a series of stories mostly exploring the lives of Chinese immigrants to the US, though some of the stories are set in China, where Li was born. Li is one of the greatest short story writers alive today, period. Part of her greatness is her profound understatement: the prose is disarmingly simple, hiding how brilliant it is.
Reading this collection is like a conjuring trick in which a familiar room becomes unfamiliar, but you arenāt sure how; you only know that the interior has altered. A standout: The Princess of Nebraska, in which a Chinese woman studying in the US goes for abortion care, supported by an older man. I use the opening paragraph of this story when I teach as a demonstration of how to convey, apparently without effort, every significant detail within the first page, except one crucial detail, which you could never guess.
Brilliant and original, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers introduces a remarkable new writer whose breathtaking stories are set in China and among Chinese Americans in the United States. In this rich, astonishing collection, Yiyun Li illuminates how mythology, politics, history, and culture intersect with personality to create fate. From the bustling heart of Beijing, to a fast-food restaurant in Chicago, to the barren expanse of Inner Mongolia, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers reveals worlds both foreign and familiar, with heartbreaking honesty and in beautiful prose.
āImmortality,ā winner of The Paris Reviewās Plimpton Prize for new writers, tells theā¦
Jo Jackson believes she has put behind her difficult childhood with a charismatic but sometimes violent father. One day, however, out of the blue, she is moved to write about him. Immediately she comes unstuck, face to face with things that don't add up, and a growing sense of mysteryā¦
Sheās best known for her novel The Namesake, which was made into a film, and her first collection, The Interpreter of Maladies. Theyāre good. Read this one. As a side note, she also moved from the US to Italy, learned Italian, and began publishing in Italian. Her work has now been translated from Italian and back to English. This is, itself, astonishing. As is this book.
Again, this is technically a novel but reads, daringly, as short fiction. A woman, middle-aged, single, and childless, goes about her days in a large Italian city. She shops for groceries, chats with friends, thinks about her childhood, and thinks about aging. Each section is short, unadorned, perfect. You wonāt believe how perfect. I love this book also because itās so obviously ādomestic fiction,ā concerned with private life, with tiny moments of transition, but puts a solitary woman at the center. It is a brilliant novel about being alone, how generative that can be, and how fruitful it is.
Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. The woman at the center wavers between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. The city she calls home, an engaging backdrop to her days, acts as a confidant: the sidewalks around her house, parks, bridges, piazzas, streets, stores, coffee bars. We follow her to the pool she frequents and to the train station that sometimes leads her to her mother, mired in a desperate solitude after her father's untimely death. In addition to colleaguesā¦
A young mother intrudes into the life of an older woman, thinking she knows whatās best. An academic becomes convinced that he is haunted by his double. Two children spy on their supposedly criminal neighbors. A man enables his cousinās predatory impulses out of loyalty, and a circus performer dreams of a perfect wedding. These characters fail despite their best intentions and continue on despite their failures.
In May 1941, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, hums with talk of spring flowers, fishing derbies, and the growing war in Europe. And for the residents of a quiet neighborhood boarding house, the winds of change are blowing.
Self-proclaimed spinster, Bessie Blackwell, is the reluctant owner of a new pair of glasses. Theā¦
Charlotte Roseās quiet life on a remote island is forever changed the day Michael Cordero, injured and bleeding, steers his ketch, Shearwater, into her cove. Charlotte tends to Michaelās wounds, using the skills sheās learned caring for her husband and son, who are away fishing for salmon. As Michael recovers,ā¦