43 books like Selected Stories

On any given day, this is my favorite book with one of my favorite bars, The Vine, a dive that Johnson describes as “like a railroad club car that had somehow run itself off the tracks into a swamp of time where it awaited the blows of the wrecking ball.” Is it a nice place? No. Would you take a date here? Not if you wanted them to respect you. Could you find yourself in mortal danger? Absolutely. But amongst the addicts and runaways, the small-time crooks and ne’er do wells, you’ll find moments of beauty that transcend the pain of everyday life, becoming, in its best moments, like reading scripture.

Unlike Welty’s works featuring honorable or broadly comic characters, this dense story cycle was never excerpted in anthologies. It’s a trickier cast: consider Jinny Love Stark and Virgie Rainey, who cut through the languor of Depression-era Mississippi with stone-cold intention. Jinny Love plays croquet with her lover to enrage her volatile husband; she encourages her daughter to wear lizards as earrings to offend the propriety of her own controlling mother. Impoverished piano prodigy Virgie flouts her gift merely to watch her teacher go mad. Later, she trims her dead mother’s yard with sewing scissors while neighbors do the real work of laying out the body and receiving mourners. The heat presses forward. What day is it? What hour? This is weird, experimental Welty, and the payoff is sweet.

Times in my life when I’ve made terrible choices, I’ve thought, while making those choices: To hell with you people, I don’t care what you think of me, I’m going to be my own person, screw appearances and reputation. Other times I’ve made terrible choices, I’ve thought: I’m doing what’s expected of me, that’s all. This collection of short stories offers a gallery of complex and warm characters, some of whom disgrace themselves via transgression, some via passivity. 

I’m not sure anyone has written with such clarity about the everyday horror of social/cultural alienation better than Shirley Jackson.

I loved reading about the main character, Merricat, and her trips into town to purchase groceries and other common household goods. The pariah-like way she is received by the allegedly typical townsfolk is a theme I—admittedly to a much lesser degree—wanted to include in my own writing.  

Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas’ book helped me understand the financial and life well-being of the poor as it compares the marriage and childrearing norms among them to those of the elite.

Elite mothers raise their children as “hothouse plants” and measure their success by their children’s educational and career accomplishments. Poor mothers raise their children as “field plants,” expected to grow naturally, expecting few educational and career accomplishments.

Poor women know that marriage is fragile, and so they make their primary emotional investments in their relationships with their children. A poor mother of a four-year-old son described him as her heart. She’ll have her son even if her marriage goes sour. She’ll say to her husband, ‘You leave! This boy is mine.’”

I was moved by the profound look into a young man’s grief and guilt and confusion that Canadian author Matt Cohen offered us in this, his last novel. Carl’s mother is dead, killed at the age of 51 in a car accident for which Carl is (mostly) responsible. After the funeral, Carl fled. Now, three years later, he’s back in his hometown, population 684, attempting to start over and reconnect with his seven-year-old daughter. It’s a long, hard fight for redemption in a town where the habitants—a grand cast of them—have long memories of who Carl was and what he did. Matt Cohen died a few weeks after the book won the Governor General’s Prize for English-Language Fiction.

The bicentennial of the War of 1812 injected new life into a largely sidelined subject in early American history, drawing a variety of contributions from a range of historians. The Civil War of 1812 is the contribution of one of the leading historians of early America. Beautifully written, as are all of Taylor’s books, this book focuses primarily on the political, social, and cultural aspects of the conflict that transpired along the United States-Canadian borderlands.  In so doing, he gives equal attention to divisions the war caused in Canadian, Native American, and U.S. communities.

I absolutely love Blunt’s writing in this series. It is nuanced and beautifully paired with the troubled, multi-faceted characters. The books are set in the fictional town of Algonquin Bay, based in North Bay in Northern Ontario, a part of the country I know well having grown up a bit farther north and west. The setting permeates the stories—small town, dead of winter, lots of bush and conifer trees. The discovery of a body in a mine shaft fits perfectly. John Cardinal, lead cop, is struggling to help his clinically depressed wife and has recently been demoted. He’s a compelling character and so well drawn as is his new partner Lise Delorme. The books have been made into a gritty television series with superb acting, but I’d say read the books first because the writing is just that good.

We all need rock stars to idolize, and mine is Alice Munro, a Canadian writer whose books are mostly short story collections about the quietly intense lives of farmers and townspeople in rural Canada.

I’m from a generation of writers who learned about writing through the stories of Alice Munro, Anton Chekhov, and Raymond Carver, among others. Choosing my favorite Munro book is a challenge—for decades I read them all over and over—but if I had to, I’d say it’s Dance of the Happy Shades.

No one understands better what it’s like to be an adolescent girl than Alice Munro, and no one is more gifted at portraying it, particularly in the stories “An Ounce of Cure” and “Red Dress—1946,” with such generous characterizations and courageous honesty.

Carol Shields’ last novel, Unless (published after her death) follows forty-something mom Reta Winters: Reta’s three daughters are almost grown, she has decent work translating French writers, and she has a supportive husband. Then oldest daughter Norah disappears, and it turns out Norah is now living on the streets of downtown Toronto, wearing a sign around her neck that reads “goodness,” but not speaking a word. This sounds like a bleak scenario, having one’s daughter reject everything she’s grown up with and refusing to explain. But Unless is a sharp, thoughtful, and even funny novel, one that’s not like any other that I’ve read, and Norah’s disappearance leads Reta to come of age as she questions every aspect of her life.