"City Boy", by Leonard Michaels (1969)

This story makes me laugh, inwardly, or if having consumed beer, I might even use throat, teeth and tongue, and do a proper LOL. Often the laugh (inward, or out) is in different places to the times I'd laughed when reading it before. And it's great fun to read aloud. You should try it. It feels very Portnoy, which was of course published in the same year as this: 1969.

Incidentally (very incidentally), Micheals' protagonist is called Phillip, and Roth's is called Alex(ander), which strikes a similar register to Leonard, although I don't think either Roth or Michaels were tipping their hats (or cocking a snook) at each other.

Even the year (1969) has a scabrous, slightly surreal silliness to it looks-wise: all those beast-with-two-backs sixes and nines. So much so that at the end of the piece I couldn't actually bring myself to read the year, which Ford appends to every story in the anthology. Also, how does one intonate Veronica's demand (entreaty?) to Philip in the last paragraph? My reading of it sounds a little cranky, when presumably she would have uttered the endearment...well, how?

Answers on an MP3, please.

[Download the story] 

Christmas Stories, edited by Diana Secker Tesdell

When I read on Amazon a couple of one-star reviews (bear with me) for Diana Secker Tesdell's selection of Christmas stories, I knew straight off that this would the perfect collection for our group to be reading and talking about this December.

The first review, written by a certain Francis M. Schiraldi of Eugene, Oregon fulminates thus:

"Every home that celebrates Christmas deserves an anthology of beloved holiday stories that enrich the season. This is not it. Despite the nostalgic cover and the ribbon marker, this rather unpleasant collection lacks most of the familiar and seems to focus on the morbid and depressing. Probably more suited to the jaded and cynical reader, don't buy this one if you are looking for an abridged version of 'A Christmas Carol' to read aloud or 'The Night Before Christmas.'"

In the second review, with a sharp intake of breath, Mary C. Hattan of Coosa County, Alabama opines:

"The stories were not what I expected. They included Lesbians, alchoholics, and for the most part the stories were not the warm ones I would share with my friends."
Well, Francis and Mary.

Aware as we are that Christmas, for many people, is as much about loneliness and alienation (short story territory par excellence) as Victorian families gathered round fires with cheeky urchins caroling in the snow-bedecked yard, we say: BRING ON THE MORBID, DEPRESSING, LESBIAN-FRIENDLY CHRISTMAS TALES (please).

Although the cover of the volume is the kind of naff you'd expect from a self-promoting Christmas Collection, it's stuffed to the gills with wonderful stories by the likes of  Tolstoy, John Updike, Alice Munro, Grace Paley, and even Vlad Nabokov.

A more measured review of Tessdale's selection, written by Penelope Lively in The Independent, can be found here.

"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson

A great reading and discussion of this creepy story by A.M. Homes on The New Yorker Fiction podcast.

The Best International Short Story Collection of 2011 (maybe)

At this very moment, in a Top Secret International Venue*, three highly esteemed Lit-Criterati** are debating the merits of a collection of short stories published in 2011, with the primary expectation of handing out a very large sum of wonga "rewarding an individual author's commitment to this most exacting of forms and encouraging the publication of collections of stories in book form as distinct from single stories in periodicals".

Yep, it's the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, which is either going to be won this year by:


Gold Boy, Emerald Girl - Yiyun Li (Beijing-born, American Resident)
Light Lifting - Alexander MacLeod (Canadian debutante)
Saints and Sinners - Edna O’Brien (Irish)
Death is Not an Option - Suzanne Rivecca (American Debutante)
The Empty Family - Colm Tóibín (Irish)
Marry or Burn - Valerie Trueblood (American)

We will be reading THE WINNER.

(Alas, this is the way our X-Factoried world works: people want to read WINNERS, not LOSERS, even if the winner in this case might not be the book of stories that is best placed to foment your personal and probably rather particular spiritual, aesthetic and humoral juices.)

If you want to spend some time with a couple of  LOSERS (I'm currently reading Colm Tóibín's collection, see photo, who has the face but not the literary CV of a LOSER), you may wish to work your way through the whole darn short list, or even the long one.  Whatever you do, we will be gathering to discuss on November 16, the WINNER of this year's Frank O'Connor International Story Collection.

Should also be a nice tie-in with National Short Story Week, if you go for these kinds of annual remembrances.

*Slough
**They did it for the free books. Wouldn't you?

Will the real (i.e. best translated) Chekhov please stand up?

If we're going to do this proper-like, it makes sense (at least at the beginning of our endeavor) to tip our collective hats to the progenitor of the modern short story, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. So this is who we shall be reading and discussing in October's Meet-up.

As Chris Power says in the first entry for A Brief Survey of The Short Story:

"I couldn't justify starting with anyone else because for me he's the uncontestable father of the modern short story, both by dint of bridging 19th-century realism and 20th-century experimentation and because his stories are some of the best that have ever been written. Plus, spit in a bookshop and chances are you'll hit something marked by his influence. Unless you're in the coffee bar."

Indeed.

But which translation to go for? A bit of Internet delving would seem to suggest that the husband and wife team of Pevear and Volokhonsky are at the moment in possession of the leafiest of the translation laurels, but but Mr Knowles has said he'd sound out a Professor or two on this matter too (thank you Mr Knowles).

Here's a pic of Pevear and Volokhonsky, BTW. Bless.

"A Perfect Day for Bananfish" by J.D Salinger

Richard Ford mentions in his intro to the Granta selection that he was unable to include the following story because of the anal-retentiveness of the Salinger Estate. One wonders if they're still so finicky post-mortem. A brief Google-search confirms this may be the case.

So who knows how long the reading I've made of this story will stay on here until J.D's legal rottweiler (Pam Malpas) decides to drop me a line.

Looking forward to getting some mail from the esteemed Harold Ober Associates Incorporated,  425 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10017.

(Pam, please address all correspondence to theshortstorybookclub AT gmail.com. Cheers.)

[Download a reading of the story]

The Granta Book of the American Short Story, Edited by Richard Ford

As I'm something of a sucker for American short story writers, I thought I'd nail our colours (though not necessarily red, white, and blue) to the mast and suggest we get our club a-rockin' and a-rollin' with this superb selection by Richard Ford.

Oodles and oodles of good stuff to be savoured and talked about. Classics and stories-on-the-verge-of- becoming-classics. It also trounces the Joyce Carol Oates Oxford collection, I would suggest, which I find to be a somewhat overtly well-meaning, and didactic affair.

The Ford selection is however, a big fat collection, and I know that one of the undeclared aims of our group is not to have to feel the ponderous heft of Literature weighing down upon us from month to month as we submit to the pleasures of short fiction. So please feel free to read a couple of pieces only; whatever takes your fancy really.

As opposed to novels, which I would expect to hook me in a chapter or two, I usually don't force myself to read much beyond the second page of a story that's not exciting me. However, saying that, there is the odd tale that has won me over on page three or four. Few and far between though. The whole raison d'etre of the form (God bless it) is to grab you from the offset.

More about the September Meet Up and future books we'll be exploring can be found here.