Bored of your usual rectangular reading material? Or even just bored at your desk? featherproof books, one of the most inventive and interesting indie presses around (and the publisher of two of our very favorite books of 2010 – Lindsay Hunter’s Daddy’s and Patrick Somerville’s The Universe in Miniature in Miniature), and purveyors of several free downloadable “mini-books”, have pioneered a whole new way to read short stories: in origami form. Hence, though we’re sure you’ve already gotten there, storigami. Fair warning: they’re kind of hard. We don’t remember origami being this hard, but maybe our minds were just more pliable when we were children. Or was it the paper that was more pliable? No matter. We suggest starting with The Fox – it’s the easiest, and may wake up some decades-dormant origami muscles. Plus, much like pistachios, stories just taste better if you have to work a little bit to get at them. No one really likes pre-shelled pistachios. If you think you’re up to the challenge, just print out the images, follow the instructions, and then read and let the stories – wait for it – unfold.
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Boundary-pushing author T.C. Boyle’s latest short-story collection offers a strong combination of varied genres and literary inquiries.
Though the 14 selected pieces in Wild Child and Other Stories have little to do with one another — apart from all sharing Boyle’s interrogative imagination — the book’s overall effect is like looking at a subtly distorted mirror. Stories range from the title piece’s un-sentimentalized retelling of the tale of a feral boy found in late 18th-century France to a Borges-worthy look at practical existentialism in “Sin Dolor” and the teardown of typical pet/owner relationships in “Thirteen Hundred Rats.”
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Though the creative output of John Hughes had slowed to a crawl in the decade preceding his death in August at age 59, the iconic director’s alter ego JL Hudson wasn’t taking to retirement quite so easily. Penning screenplays, essays, and fiction for his own amusement, some of his later writing — imbued with the same irreverent, sly but tender narrative quality as his film work — saw the light of day as a series called Very, Very Short Stories (some only four brief paragraphs in length). Excerpts after the jump.
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Newcomer lit mag Electric Literature wowed us with its first issue last summer; the periodical has since released a second issue featuring writers-we-love Lydia Davis and Pasha Malla, plus an animated video series to boot. Expanding on its ethos of bringing literary geekdom back to pop culture, Electric Literature engages readers old and new with outreach into other art forms and across multiple platforms. Peep artist Jonathan Ashley’s animation, taken from a single sentence out of Stephen O’Connor’s epic story in the current issue (also excerpted after the jump).
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“I’m in love with you,” she’d told him matter-of-factly, “and it’s beginning to hurt.”
So goes a climactic moment in the story that gives James Lasdun’s new collection, It’s Beginning to Hurt, its name. The story in question is barely three pages long, but Lasdun writes like an iceberg, meaning that those three pages represent just the one-eighth we can see floating above the water. Here’s what The Rumpus had to say about the collection: “The delivery of a revelation, the subtle gesture that shifts the reality of everything that has come before—these are Lasdun’s bread and butter, giving his stories their understated luster.”
After the jump, Lasdun shares his short story recommendations with us, including the one he calls “far and away the most powerful single short story in the English language written in the last fifty years.” Read More »
Lydia Peelle’s debut story collection Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing
assembles eight rough-cut narrative gems, of which two have already garnered Pushcart Prizes and one more an O. Henry Short Story Award. Not bad for a fresh voice on the scene. A native of Boston, Peelle now lives in Nashville, the city center of an agrarian swath of Tennessee where most of the tales are based.
Despite comparisons to Faulkner, it would be misleading to assign her characters the expected deep-rooted longing for the “Old South.” A sense of bewilderment, and even depression at the current state of affairs, is palpable, yet the root of the problem lies in the fact that no one — from Jack Welch the taxidermist to Cole, a troubled young man on the road with a traveling fair — can shape any answers to our modern-day predicament. Read More »
The Fiction Fix is your weekly dose of short story. If that’s not your drug of choice, too bad: consider it medicine, for your blogged-out brain and for the ailing genre itself. Every week, we’ll scour the literary magazines you don’t have time to read, online and in print, and let you know where to find one story worth reading.
The Adirondack Review publishes “evolving” quarterly issues, which is to say, they’re posting content as they go, rather than a whole issue at once. In the current iteration of Winter 2008-2009/Volume IX, No. 4, we found A Clever Tongue in His Head, by Amy Gottfried. This sharp little piece combines ghosts, grief, and literary criticism, and still manages to tell us something about the ‘”emotion systems” in animals.’
Peter Selgin’s first book of short stories, Drowning Lessons, was the winner of 2008′s Flannery O’Connor prize for short fiction, so we had high expectations when we headed to KGB Bar’s Sunday night fiction series to hear him read. Luckily Selgin did not disappoint. In fact, we so thoroughly enjoyed his brisk reading of “Color of the Sea,” the story of an unlikely pair of traveling companions, that we asked if he would tell us about his favorite short stories.
After the jump, a list of Selgin’s influences. We’re sorry that one of our favorite authors, Flannery, didn’t make the cut, but we’re excited to have a few new names to explore — starting with first generation feminist Tillie Olsen.
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Trust that one of the members of a twee, glockenspiel-loving indie pop band from Wales with exclamation points littering their song titles and literary lyrics like “If only you would give your life to literature just/Don’t read Jane Eyre!” have strong, interesting opinions about what they read in their downtime.
Not they have much of it — LOS CAMPESINOS! released their second full-length album WE ARE BEAUTIFUL, WE ARE DOOMED last week after dropping their debut effort earlier this year.
To our point, this latest album contains a track called “The End Of The Asterisk.” Somewhere our high school English teacher is smiling.
After the jump hipster poster girl and ardent book worm Ellen Campesinos! (bass and vocals) takes time from the band’s European tour to reveal her favorite short story. If you’ve already read it, leave us your review in the comments.
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