Boyles, Chen, Clerson, Eunyoung, Li, Ruffin, and So

Short Stories in July, August, and September

Whether in a dedicated collection or an anthology, these stories capture a variety of reading moods.

This quarter, I returned to a favourite writer and also explored seven new-to-me story writers.

This year I think I’m reading more collections of short stories than usual, but I’m not taking notes with all of them. Especially volumes like Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You (2021). Many of his stories are just a couple of pages long; it seems like you only have time to exhale before they are over. The idea of flagging a sentence or two in these scenes felt fragmentary. Even when a phrase stuck out (like “witch’s cackle of wind”, which played over in my mind afterwards for a few days). These are the New Orleans stories that don’t make it into the airline magazines, but they are vibrant and evocative. Like rum-soaked cake, still sweet but rich and heavy and meant to be savoured over time.

Life Ruffin’s collection, Anthony Veasna So’s Afterparties (2021) prioritizes characters whose lives are often overlooked in fiction, working-class and low-wage/no-wage families. Donut shop, bigbox-store, video store, classroom, pharmacy: in all these everyday places, these characters negotiate questions of belonging and loneliness. The dialogue is realistic and the stories revolve around events that reveal aspects of characterization that are significant enough to hang the reader’s coat upon: “When you think about my history, I don’t need you to see everything at once.”

Recognizing how slippery it had become, how often I was just floating through the stories without flags and notes, I told myself to change my tune with Shoko’s Smile by Choi Eunyoung (2021) Translated by Sung Ryu.

Unlike Ruffin’s stories, hers are longer and dense with detail, with scenes of dialogue. But even when the themes seem simple, even gentle, there is an expected thread of tension that made it difficult to stop and reflect.

This passage from “A Song from Afar” hints at this: “I had wanted my emotions to stay like carefully stacked plates instead of crashing down, paranoid that their shards might stab and upset my insides.”

Such a domestic, staid image—those stacked plates—but, then, imagined but vivid injury. This story collection camped out on my library card: I was reluctant to return it.

“In grade seven, I was gifted a geologic timescale, which I stuck to the wall and liked to read from beginning to end. In order of era, I memorized the names of organisms that had lived in each until I could recite the whole scale by the time I started high school. I did it because the names of things that weren’t here now but had once clearly existed felt precious.” Hanji and Youngju

Contents: Shoko’s Smile; Xin Chào Xin Chào; Sister My Little Soonae; Hanji and Youngju; A Song from Afar; Michaela; The Secret

The stories in Yiyun Li’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2005) are deftly told with a remarkable simplicity reminiscent of Souvankham Thammavongsa and Madeleine Thien. They’re character-driven with a hint of the swift expansiveness that Munro and Gallant excel at; sometimes she encapsulates a long history in a few phrases, then rapidly approaches and focusses on a single pivotal moment.

Ultimately, it’s the theme or idea that resonates most strongly (the kind of story we tend to summarize as “the one in which the daughter dies”). But without the attention that she pays to characterization, readers wouldn’t hold that idea so tightly. Overall, the collection is saturated with an unshakeable sorrow, but what balances that out? The sheer determination of the telling of it. And, so, the heartbreak is witnessed and lessened by a single beat. “It is the sunflower seeds, sweet and salty and slightly bitter from the nameless spices Gong’s Dried Goods Shop uses to process its sunflower seeds, and the English novels she bought in college—a full shelf of them, each one worthy of someone’s lifetime to study—that make her life bearable.” (Love in the Marketplace)

Contents: Extra; After a Life; Immortality; Princess of Nebraska; Love in the Marketplace; Son; The Arrangement; Death is not a Bad Joke if Told the Right Way; Persimmons; A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

QC Fiction, 2021

David Clerson To See out the Night (2019; Trans. Katia Grubisic, 2021) just published by QC Fiction is such a skinny volume of stories, it’s barely there—like the small cut on your hand that you don’t notice until you’re squeezing a lemon.

A recurring theme is what lies beneath—what you can and can’t see in another’s eyes, the cityscape on the flipside of the Earth, what flourishes in the dark, the liminal layer obscured by the brush on the forest floor. Stories with words like “sphagnum moss”, “bicephalous”, “putrified” and “taxidermied”: they work at gut level.

The direct and simultaneously disorienting style reminds me of Samanta Schweblin’s stories (more about them in the next quarterly), with the kind of creep factor that one enjoys in Robert Shearman’s stories (but he’s more about character), and the undercurrent of a wry, sad smile directed at the world that edges towards Etgar Keret territory.

If they were all stories about writers and thieves and thieving writers, I would have felt more at home; then again, this is the kind of collection that makes you notice all the bad smells in your safest spaces. (In a good way.)

Contents: The Ape Within, Yamachiche, City Within, The Forest and the City, The Language of Hunters, The World Beyond, Poland, Sukhumi, Shipwrecks, Jellyfish, The Dog Without a Head, From my Tumour with Love

The Decameron Project: 29 New Stories from the Pandemic, contains a number of works by bestselling and acclaimed authors, all selected by the editors of The New York Times Magazine (2020) and illustrated by Sophy Hollington. Born out of the strange and sudden emergence of sales of Boccaccio’s 14th-century The Decameron in March 2020, a collection of “nested tales told by and for a group of women and men sheltering in place outside of Florence as the plague ravages the city” (Caitlin Roper sets the scene in her introduction).

I expected these stories to be alarming, but they are often ordinary and consistently short (often five-minutes, occasionally ten, of reading). Alejandra Zambra’s “Screen Time” (Trans. Megan McDowell) is about the slippery slope of parents adjusting their child’s viewing habits as the weeks pass. Uzodinma Iweala’s “Sleep” contemplates the possible and impossible, the balance between past and future when the present is strange and unfamiliar. A sky the colour of grapefruit and the daily death tallies are a reminder of wartime in 1980s’ Tehran in Dina Nayeri’s “The Cellar”. And “A time of Death, the Death of Time” by Juliàn Juks, in which time no longer makes sense.

It’s the kind of collection that might serve as a hateful housewarming gift, if one was ever in a position to contemplate that kind of purchase.

Goose Lane, 2021

Soon, I’ll be discussing Patricia Robertson’s Hour of the Crab (2021) in the context of Here and Elsewhere reading, stories about people who are between places, but here’s a peek. One of the qualities that I most enjoyed about these stories was the sense of an arc that did not complete as expected. Which is to say that, particularly in the longer stories, I would inwardly be predicting how she might resolve the stories, but the final scene slid into something else entirely, in a quiet and ordinary way.

There is an acknowledgement of power and predictability: “Numbers were predictable; they behaved. Tame lions, with him holding the whip, leaping through hoops at his command.”(The Oud-Maker’s Son) And there are all sorts of stressors, small and large, and survival is not guaranteed. “What you’d gone through couldn’t be ungone through. You held it at bay however you could. And sometimes you couldn’t.” (Bring Down Your Angels and Get Me Free)

Her worlds are preoccupied with dualities: “Fire fighters and fire were locked together in an embrace, a chokehold, and who were you if you didn’t have fires to fights? But these stories envelop you in a different kind of embrace, so that you needn’t choose in that moment, to be fire or fighter, but to simply inhabit the scene and eyeball the waypoints between those states.

Contents: Hour of the Crab; Happiness; The Gate of Charity; The Oud-Maker’s Son; Speaking in Tongues; Bring Down Your Angels and Get Me Free; Fire Breathing; The Calligrapher’s Daughter; The Master of Salt; The Old Speech

The first character I met in Te-Ping Chen’s Land of Big Numbers (2021), Lulu (whose story comes via her twin brother), was such a find that I found myself missing her for the rest of the collection. That’s unfair—because there are several engaging characters and narratives in this debut collection—but her story ends without a clear resolution, so I yearned for news of her, sought to read clues of her fate in the remaining stories.

That’s the thing about these stories, though: there’s an inherent (and sometimes overt) tension, the characters are compelled to respond, and the endings within their grasp are not satisfying. I don’t mean that the writing is lacking, the opportunities are lacking, or the characters let them pass by. Sometimes their inaction stems from a deeper sadness, which is also haunting. In two stories in particular, however, the final actions are so dramatic that they are almost shocking.

That’s the other thing about this collection; even though I thought that I wasn’t over Lulu, now that I think about it, I want to tell you about so many of the other characters in these stories. Te-Ping Chen has cast a spell over me and I can hardly wait to see what she writes next. Her energy reminds me of stories by David Bezmozgis or Nathan Englander. I’m also mesmerized by her author photo, which perfectly captures all the conflicting emotions that I felt while reading. “I look out the window and think about hibernation: how wonderful, to fall asleep and wake up to a new season.”

Contents: Lulu, Hotline Girl, New Fruit, Field Notes on a Marriage, Flying Machine, On the Street Where You Live, Shanghai Murmur, Land of Big Numbers, Beautiful Country, Guneikou Spirit

Claire Boyles Site Fidelity (2021) reminded me of Megan Mayhew Bergman’s Birds of a Lesser Paradise. In the opening story, Mano observes, via art class, that “vision was a layered thing, something beyond physical sight” and Boyles’ stories have that feel to them too. It’s as though they are about the immediate and the distant, simultaneously. And quiet, tempered: “I think about the things we both know but won’t say out loud.” (Flood Stories)

There are ordinary and strange details: cloud systems, Rocky Mountain National Park, a dog barking at invisible squirrel, and a woman dressed in polar bear leotard lying on her back to juggle four clear plastic cubes with all four limbs. (A whiff of Karen Russell, or Bryan Washington here.)

But the stakes are high: “She began listing, silently, everything she could see was still standing, so much easier to bear than a list of everything that had washed away.” (Natural Resource Management)

Like Lorrie Moore’s and Olive Senior’s, these are stories that flow. When you reach the end of one, you’ll be tempted to read for another. But let them simmer. Allow their simple truths to settle. “Medical instructions for the end of life and the beginning of it are surprisingly similar.”

Contents: Ledgers; Alto Cumulus Standing Lenticulars; Early Warning Systems; The Best Response to Fear; Sister Agnes Mary in the Spring of 2012; Man Camp; Flood Stories; Natural Resource Management; Lost Gun, $1000 Reward, No Questions; Chickens

And you? Any short stories lately?